Year: 2011
Type: report
Abstract: espite President Johnson's declaration of a War on Poverty nearly fifty years ago, poverty remains pervasive.Child poverty is particularly widespread.Nearly 22 percent of America's children live in poverty, 1 compared with 14 percent of the total population. 2 Poverty is geographically concentrated, and it ebbs and flows with economic cycles.However, in some parts of the country, especially in rural counties, poverty has persisted for generations.Persistent high poverty is more prevalent among children than the population as a whole.We find persistent child poverty (defined on page 2) in nearly twice as many U.S. counties as those that report high persistent poverty across all age groups.In all, 342 counties have experienced persistently high levels of poverty across all age groups during the past twenty-nine years.In contrast, more than 700 counties experienced persistent child poverty over the same period (see Figure 1).Our purpose in this brief is to identify those counties where child poverty has persisted, describe their geographic distribution, and identify their characteristics.We find that persistent child poverty is spatially concentrated in parts of the country, and that it occurs across racial-ethnic groups. High Child Poverty in Recent YearsIn 2010, 22 percent of American children lived in poverty, with rates significantly higher for those in rural areas and in urban cores (over 25 percent for each).3 The American Community Survey from 2009 shows that child poverty was particularly high among children residing in homes headed by a single mother (40 percent) 4 and among racial minorities (36 percent of black and 31 percent of Hispanic children were poor).5 Many of these children are growing up in places where high child poverty has persisted for decades. Key Findings
DOI: 10.34051/p/2020.150
Institution: University of New Hampshire
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W1949092438