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The elementary school in Independence serves free lunches to hungry kids during the winter break, in recognition that there are a lot of economically struggling families in the community.
(Beth Nakamura / The Oregonian)
Oregon experienced one of the nation's most severe increases in people living in areas of concentrated poverty during the first decade of this century, according to a new Census Bureau study of living situations in 2000 and 2010.
It was one of just four states -- all in the South except Oregon -- where the share of people living in census tracts with a high share of impoverished residents shot up more than 15 percentage points over that period.
Part of why Oregon saw such a tremendous increase was that it started out in a very good position in 2000. That year, 90 percent of Oregonians, including almost 80 percent of impoverished Oregonians, lived in areas where fewer than 20 percent of residents were poor.
After just 10 years of change, however, Oregon ended up slightly worst than the national average. It experienced a large increase in non-poor people living in a high-poverty area and a humongous increase in poor people living in one.
In 2000, 75 percent of Oregonians lived in a tract -- areas delineated by the federal government that generally contain roughly 4,000 residents -- where the poverty rate was less than 15 percent. Only 10 percent of Oregonians lived in a tract the federal government considers a high-poverty area, that is, one where at least 20 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line. Nationally, almost twice that share of the population lived in a high-poverty tract.
But that situation changed dramatically in Oregon by 2010, with only about half of the state's residents living in low-poverty tracts and 26 percent -- or nearly 1 million people -- in high-poverty tracts.
The study doesn't say which Oregonians were most affected, but nationally, white people, employed people and people with low education levels were the most likely to switch from living in a low- or moderate-poverty area to a high-poverty one. Many more Oregonians ended up in high-poverty tracts in Multnomah, Marion and Lane counties as well as in more rural areas including Jefferson County and those on or near the Oregon coast.
Life can be a struggle when you're poor, regardless of what neighborhood you live in. So why does it matter whether a person, poor or not, lives in a neighborhood or tract that has low versus high poverty?
According to the study, research shows that living in a community with a concentration of people in poverty adds burdens, particularly to low-income families. People who live in such areas face higher crime rates, poor housing conditions and fewer job opportunities. Those effects are exacerbated when poor people are clustered in the same neighborhood, it says.
Washington, which typically has demographics somewhat similar to Oregon, started out with about the same proportion of its population living in high-poverty tracts, 11 percent. But it saw a much more moderate increase, to 19 percent, than Oregon did.
Oregon's big increase in people living in high-poverty areas was most similar to the pattern shown in North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia and South Carolina, the study found.
-- Betsy Hammond