Cities Hit Hardest by Extreme Poverty

Of the 104,600 people living below the poverty line in Toledo, Ohio, 27% reside in neighborhoods where at least 40% of the population are also poor. Economic opportunities are relatively scarce in Toledo’s poor neighborhoods as the unemployment rate across these areas stands at 18.3% — nearly triple the 6.5% unemployment rate in the rest of the city.

Educational outcomes tend to lag in poor neighborhoods. Fewer than three out of four adults living in Toledo’s concentrated poverty neighborhoods have a high school diploma. In the rest of the metro area, more than nine out of 10 adults have a high school education.

Cleveland’s 27.0% concentrated poverty rate is the highest in Ohio — narrowly edging out Toledo — and sixth highest of any metro area in the country. The number of people living below the poverty line in Cleveland climbed from 294,000 in 2011 to 301,000 in 2017. The growing ranks of poor metro area residents pushed the concentrated poverty rate up by 1.2 percentage points during a period when concentrated poverty declined by 1.6 percentage points nationwide. The number of Cleveland neighborhoods where at least 40% of the population lives below the poverty line climbed from 76 to 86 between 2011 and 2017.

Undergoing steep economic and population decline in the latter half of the 20th century with the fall of American manufacturing, Cleveland is a classic Rust Belt city. A shadow of its former self, Cleveland proper is now home to fewer than 400,000 people, down from a peak of nearly 1 million in 1950.

Bakersfield is one of two California metro areas to rank among the five worst cities for concentrated poverty in the United States. The number of people living below the poverty line in Bakersfield climbed from 169,600 in 2011 to 191,100 in 2017. Over the same period, the metro area’s concentrated poverty rate climbed from 26.4% to 27.1%. In poor neighborhoods, often public education institutions have strained resources, and as a result education outcomes there are often lagging. Across the poorest neighborhoods in Bakersfield, just 57.0% of adults have a high school diploma compared to 76.5% of adults in the rest of the metro area.

There are nearly 71,000 people in the Memphis metro area living below the poverty line in neighborhoods where at least 40% of the population also lives in poverty — or 28.4% of the metro area’s poor population. Extreme poverty disproportionately affects Memphis’s minority population. Over a third of the metro area’s poor Hispanic and black populations who live in poverty are concentrated in poor neighborhoods compared to less than 10% of poor whites.

Crime tends to be more common in poor neighborhoods, and the high concentrated poverty rate in the metro area may partially explain Memphis’s high crime rate. There were 1,168 violent crimes for every 100,000 people in the metro area in 2017, well above the national violent crime rate of 383 per 100,000.

Over 666,000 Detroit metro area residents live below the poverty line — and nearly 30% of them face the additional challenges posed by living in a concentrated poverty neighborhood. Often due in part to underfunded school systems, educational attainment rates tend to be low in poor neighborhoods, and low educational attainment in turn restricts social and economic mobility. In Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods, fewer than three out of four adults have completed high school compared to over 90% of adults across the rest of the metro area.

As is often the case in American cities, minority populations are disproportionately affected by extreme poverty. The share of poor black and Hispanic residents living below the poverty line in poor neighborhoods is well more than double the extreme poverty rate of 15.2% among poor white residents.