10 percent of US counties experiencing persistent poverty: Census data

More than 10 percent of U.S. counties are experiencing “persistent poverty,” according to U.S. Census data released this month.

A recent census report found 10.9 percent of the country’s 3,142 counties — 341 of them — “experienced high poverty rates for an extended period.”

More than 80 percent of the counties determined to have persistent poverty were in the South, “clustered in informal subregions such as the Southwest border, the Mississippi Delta, the Southeast, Appalachia, and in some counties with higher amounts of American Indian and Alaska Native tribal lands,” according to a Census release.  

Almost 20 percent of all counties in the American South were found to be in persistent poverty. Though the South makes up 38 percent of the national population, people from the south made up 54.9 percent of people who lived in persistent poverty, the report found.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia had no persistent poverty counties — including Hawaii, Oregon and Nevada to the West, Minnesota and Iowa in the Midwest, and New Hampshire and Vermont in the Northeast.

Ten states had 10 percent or more of their population living in persistent poverty counties. Six had 15 percent or more: Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Mexico and New York.

The Census Bureau notes that “persistent poverty” is used to refer to “places with a long history of high poverty” and is different from “chronic poverty,” which refers to people experiencing consistent poverty. An area was labeled in persistent poverty if it had a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher across three decades from 1989 to 2015-2019.