Poverty: an Overview


(NOTE: Poverty - its causes, effects and the solutions to it - will be an ongoing theme of the Appalachia page...)

Poverty is probably Appalachia's leading problem.

The images of poverty in the United States often are images of the mountains: nine dirty children, a tired woman and a dirtier man standing in the yard around a rusty truck in front of a house in need of repair. The backdrop looks like Madison County, N.C., off U.S. 19W. Or maybe some place further north, near U.S. 23 somewhere in Pike County, Kentucky.

The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) was created to find solutions to the problem of poverty. That in itself acknowledges the scope of the problem - at least in 1965 when the ARC was created.

But is Appalachia still poor? How poor? And Where?

Some idea of the overall poverty problem in Appalachia today can be gained by looking at ARC data available through the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky. Kentucky has good reason for wanting the world to be aware fo the problem; Appalachian Kentucky has the highest overall poverty rate of any of the region's 13 states, as the chart below shows.

StateRate
Ky.29.84
Miss.22.51
W. Va.19.39
Ohio17.70
Tenn.17.11
N.Y.17.11
Va.16.84
Ala.16.19
Pa.13.20
U.S.13.10
N.C.13.10
Md.12.93
S.C.12.60
Ga.10.59
In Kentucky as a whole, 19% of the population lives below the poverty line; in the Appalachian portion of the state, almost 30% of the population lives below the poverty line. Eight of Appalachia's 13 states have poverty levels within the Appalachian portion of their state which are significantly above the national average.

But the extremity of poverty in portions of Appalachia also highlights the region's problems. Taken as a whole, Pennsylvania's Appalachian counties do not have a poverty rate significantly higher than the national average. But the region's most severe poverty (as measured on a census district basis) is in that state - with 80% of the population living below the poverty line in one of the state's census areas. Tennessee comes in a close second with a census district at a 79% poverty rate.

StateHighest
Census
Track
Pa.
80
Tenn.
79
N.Y.
75
Ala.
65
Ky.
63
S.C.
59
Ohio
58
W. Va.
51
N.C.
51
Miss.
49
Md.
42
Va.
36
Ga.
33

A picture being worth a thousand words, perhaps the best understanding of the geography of poverty in Appalachia comes from looking at some of the ARC maps available through the Appalachian Center. A county map of the whole of Appalachia shows 1990 poverty levels. From the map it's clear that East Kentucky and the southern half of West Virginia are the heartland of Appalachian poverty.

The copyright of the article Poverty: an Overview in Appalachia is owned by Greg Cruey. Permission to republish Poverty: an Overview in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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