Poverty By Race/Ethnicity
Areas with a high incidence of poverty often reflect the low income of their racial/ethnic minorities. Nonmetro non-Hispanic Blacks had the highest incidence of poverty in 2010, at 32.9 percent (32.2 percent in 2009). The 2010 poverty rate for nonmetro Hispanics was 29.5 percent, which is 1.7 percentage points higher than in 2009. Both non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic poverty rates for 2010 were more than twice the rate for non-Hispanic Whites (13.1 percent), which was also the case in 2009. The high rate of poverty for Hispanics is noteworthy as their share of the nonmetro population has been increasing faster than other racial/ethnic groups, from less than 3 percent in 1990 to 7.4 percent in 2010. (See the section on high-poverty counties for more about poverty in an ethnic/sub regional context.)
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Poverty by Family Composition
Family type has a significant bearing on poverty. Families headed by two adults are likely to have more sources of income than single-adult families with children and are therefore less likely to be poor. In 2010, more than one out of every 2 persons living in a nonmetro family headed by a female was poor (40.8 percent), and about one out of every 5 persons living in a nonmetro family headed by a single male was poor (21.2 percent). In contrast, approximately one out of every 13 persons in nonmetro families headed by a husband and wife was poor (7.4 percent). Those ratios reflect a 2.7 percentage point increase in poverty for female-headed families and a 3.1 percentage point increase in poverty for male-headed families from 2008 to 2010.
Poverty rates by family type also reveal large metro-nonmetro differences for single-adult families. In 2010, the poverty rate was nearly 8 percentage points higher for nonmetro families headed by a female and about 5 percentage points higher for nonmetro families headed by a male than for the same types of metro families. Those differences were 8.2 and 4.1 percentage points, respectively in 2008.
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Poverty by Age
Poverty rates also differ by age group and nonmetro/metro residence. The 2010 child poverty rate was 24.4 percent in nonmetro areas and 21.6 percent in metro areas. In contrast, the poverty rate for senior adults (65 years and older) was 10.3 percent in nonmetro areas and 8.7 percent in metro areas. Similarly, working age adults (age 18-64) had much lower poverty rates than children in nonmetro (14.8 percent) and metro (13.5 percent) areas in 2010.
Those rates reflect a significant increase in nonmetro poverty for the child population during and in the first year after the most recent recession. The poverty rate for nonmetro children increased by 2 percentage points from 2008 to 2009 and another .9 percentage points from 2009 to 2010. The overall increase in the nonmetro child poverty rate indicates that more than 2.8 million nonmetro children were in poverty in 2010 compared to 2.5 million in 2008.
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These rates do not indicate how long people live in poverty. Some families cycle into and out of poverty over time, while others are persistently poor. Persistent poverty among children is of particular concern, as the cumulative effect of being poor may lead to poor health, limited education, and other negative outcomes. Also, research suggests that the more time a child spends in poverty or living in a high poverty area, particularly those with concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities, the greater the chance of being poor as an adult. See "Child Poverty Persistent and Widespread" in Rural America at a Glance, 2009 and Rural Children at a Glance for more on this topic.
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