This blog takes a new, still sobering, yet encouraging look at the old and persistent problem of poverty. Martin Luther King Day’s annual appearance is a necessary and appropriate time to evaluate trends in and impacts of income equity and (unfortunately) inequality. Now for a good long time after the 2020 Census (with its delays, questions about quality,  and limited publishing of variables) we were unable to assess the last decade of changes in poverty rates. But in Fall of 2022, the American Community Survey 1-year released overall poverty rates for most larger counties and cities, allowing us to chart a poverty time trend from 1990 to 2021.

Some decent news: there has been overall stability in poverty rates 1990 to 2021 for all the areas we analyzed. On Figure 1, below, we aggregate data for the State, the 29-county Atlanta MSA, the “Rest of the State” (all of Georgia except the Atlanta MSA) , the 21-county Metropolitan Planning Organization area, and the 11-County ARC Region.  What immediately is clear: the trend in poverty is one of many stops, starts, surges, and sinks. For the State and “Rest of State”, there was a slight decline from 1990 to 2021. All areas showed a decline in poverty from 1990 to 2000– not surprising given the economic boom of most of that decade (record high population and job growth for Atlanta, in particular). The next decade (2000 to 2010) opened with the dot.com bust and later experienced the Great Recession, both driving up poverty. There was a slight decline with the mild recovery of the 2010s. But then came COVID –and while the associated stimulus still held poverty below the 2010 level, the negative impact of the recession was evident.

Not only were there stops and starts, but age breakdowns in the data show that certain demographics have (and have had) dramatically different poverty levels than the overall rates we just reviewed in Figure 1.

Figure 2 provides a snapshot of the rates, for the state and subarea(s) as of the 2021 1-year American Community Survey. In every area, the poverty rate of the prime working age population of 18-64 is lower than the overall rate. Also in each geography, the 65 and over poverty rate is much lower than the overall rate. But for under-18 group, the poverty rates are much higher, which pulls up the overall rate. It is notable that, in the state outside the Atlanta MSA, about 1 in 4 children are in poverty, which is ten percentage points higher than in the other subarea(s) shown. While poverty rates in all the cohorts are higher “outside Atlanta”, the gaps for the other groupings are substantially less than the differential for under-18 poverty.

Figures 3 and 4 dive deeper into the movement over time in under-18 and 65+ poverty rates. Figure 3 (immediately below) shows, for the under 18 demographic, the trend is of concern. Child poverty has surged between 2000 and 2021 in all the geographies that we analyzed. In most of them the percentage share of children in poverty nearly doubled between 1990 and 2021 –with almost all of the increase occurring after 2000. Figure 4 (at the bottom of the page) shows a more positive trend in poverty rates for the 65+ demographic. In 1990, at least for the state outside the Atlanta metro area,  poverty rates for this group are only slightly lower than for the under 18 population. However by 2021, the 65+ rates had plummeted– by over half —and the decline was consistent in both the state and subarea(s)  across the time periods.