5 takeaways:

➀ The official poverty rate is just the tip of the iceberg. The Census Bureau says the official poverty rate in the United States was 11.4% in 2020, or 37.2 million people. The pandemic year marked the first increase in poverty in five years. An even more striking measure is persistent poverty, defined as counties with more than 20% poverty rates for the last three decades.  Kiyadh Burt, senior policy analyst at the Hope Policy Institute, said there are 476 counties with this multigenerational poverty – fertile ground for journalists to explore with this list. “Communities that are located in persistent poverty counties are dealing with a different landscape of challenges in accessing adequate health, adequate employment, and adequate access to banking and financing,” Burt said.

➁ Another poverty measure is this hypothetical question. What would you do if you had to cope with a sudden $400 expense? Lowell Ricketts, data scientist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ Institute for Economic Equity, said 35% of Americans say they would have difficulty paying for that $400 expense and might have to sell something or borrow the money or put it on a credit card. “And I think this statistic is really powerful because it captures the insufficiency of liquid asset holdings across a third of American households,” Ricketts said. The Fed’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households provides more detail.

➂ As small business goes, so goes the neighborhood. Small businesses are the beating heart of a community, and when the family-owned shops lay off workers or shut down, the trickle-down impact can be devastating. “When we see the closure of these mom and pop stores … Main Street if you will, we’re losing their ability to sustain communities and sustain financial stability and wealth generation,” Burt said. He pointed journalists to the 1,200 Community Development Financial Institutions across the nation that are designed to help underserved community businesses. Reporters can contact one of those institutions to get a head start on tracking local businesses.

➃ Banking, or lack thereof, is indicative of income. For the poor, predatory financial services such as payday loans, car title loans and paycheck cash advances may be the only alternative. More than 7 million households do not have bank accounts, according to the FDIC, including 14% of Black households and 12% of Hispanic households. The most recent FDIC survey of household financial services is here.  “Simply what we have in, at least in the American system, is a two-tiered financial services system, in which we see households that do not have adequate access to financial services or no relationship with the financial institution using predatory lenders or in the most safe sense, alternative financial services to get the services that they need,” Burt said. Ricketts also suggested Bank On as a good resource for banking information.

➄ Need a local angle? The Census Bureau’s American Community Survey is tailor-made for data mining, right down to the neighborhood level, according to Wall Street Journal data reporter Paul Overberg. “There’s 26 basic poverty tables, some of them broken out separately by race. And again, this is at all levels of geography,” Overberg said.  He shared his tips for finding poverty-related data in the last 15 minutes of the NPF briefing (see video) and with a set of slides (here).  He also suggested journalists dive into the user-friendly data available at CensusReporter.org, a website built by reporters for reporters.

Speakers: 

Lowell Ricketts, Data Scientist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Kiyadh Burt, Senior Policy Analyst, Hope Policy Institute

Paul Overberg, Data Reporter, The Wall Street Journal

This program was funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.