Cleveland was third-highest in the U.S. for poverty rates, trailing only Detroit and San Bernardino, Calif., as 33.7 percent of its residents were below the 2010 federal poverty level of $22,314 set by the Office of Management and Budget.
Approximately 30.6 percent of the Queen City’s residents were below the poverty line in 2010, ranking it seventh in the nation. It was also an increase of almost five percent from the city’s 2009 poverty rate.
Ohio’s poverty rate stood at 15.8 percent, above the national average of 15.1 percent, according to results of the survey. That percentage equates to roughly 1.8 million Ohio residents living in poverty.
More striking is the disparity between the poverty rates of whites compared to other minority ethnicities in Ohio. While 12.9 percent of whites statewide were living below the poverty level, almost a third of Ohio’s black and Hispanic populations — 32.9 percent and 31.4 percent — were living in poverty.
“It’s tragic,” said Rob Nichols, press secretary for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, regarding the survey’s results.
Such results have garnered the attention of Gov. Kasich’s administration, Nichols said, and are the main reason for the administration’s efforts at job creation and reducing taxes for residents statewide.
“This is everything that (the administration) is talking about right now,” Nichols said.
One item that could be spurring the high numbers is a decreasing income. Ohio residents make approximately $7,000 less than they did 10 years ago and roughly $4,000 less since the beginning of the recession in 2007, according to Policy Matters Ohio, a non-profit research organization.
“Economic security is eroding for many Ohioans,” said Hannah Halbert, a policy liason with Policy Matters Ohio. “The gap between what families earn and what they need to make ends meet is growing. As a result, more families are falling into hardship.”
Urbanization and the state of the labor market in 2010 are two more possible reasons for the high poverty rates in Ohio’s cities, said Benjamin Passty, a research assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati’s Economics Center and former director of UC’s Applied Economics Research Institute.
“Poverty rates are usually higher in the cities. That’s because there tends to be larger extremes in the cities, period,” Passty said. “2010 is when the labor market was really starting to slow down and you’re looking at data that really comes from the worst part of the labor market all over the place.”
Poverty rates will also be higher in Ohio, Passty said, due to the state’s lower cost of living in comparison to the rest of the U.S.
“There will be higher rates of poverty in places where cost of living is lower,” Passty said. “People are actually doing better than what you’re seeing.”
On a local level, Butler County’s poverty rate stood below the national average at 13.6 percent, while Hamilton County’s was 18.4 percent. Warren County had the lowest in the state of Ohio at 5.1 percent.
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