
Mapping Poverty in America - simonsarris
http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/
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callmeed
This map should be filtered or adjusted for universities/students somehow. If
you zoom in on my city (San Luis Obispo, CA), you'd think 30% of the entire
city lived below the poverty line. This isn't true (our median home price is
approaching $600K) so I can only imagine it's skewed by Cal Poly students.

I'm no expert in statistics but the picture this map paints is misleading IMO.

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4ad
I don't think it is. Those poor students affect the environment and life in
that region just like everybody else.

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archgoon
Students are _very_ different than working poor. The working poor's income is
close to their expenditures. Most Student's 'income' will be reported as near
zero. However, their expenditures into the economy are above that, through
tuition payments and lodging. Also, they are likely to have additional
spending money that is outside of reported income.

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sliverstorm
Much of their expenditure goes to the University though, and to my knowledge
little of that flows back to the city. The University often winds up
sequestering large amounts of wealth even as the city around begins to
deteriorate.

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jchung
Mapping poverty is an inherently challenging activity. There are a huge number
of edge cases where the calculations start to make things misleading. The
poverty line itself is a point of significant contention among nonprofits and
foundations. There's a federal line, but the higher cost of living in cities
often means that you can live at 110% of the poverty line and be truly
struggling to get by. There are efforts to calculate state-level or even city-
level poverty lines. Not sure this map adjusts for that.

However, I don't want to put this map down simply because it tries to simplify
something very complicated. I do think there are a few very valuable messages
here. Particularly for folks who live in a bit of a bubble, and may not
realize how close they live to people living in poverty.

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bane
> the higher cost of living in cities often means that you can live at 110% of
> the poverty line and be truly struggling to get by.

I think it's important to make a distinction between "poor" and "poverty"
though. Struggling to get by infers that they're getting by and could be
called "poor".

Poverty, I think, implies they're not getting by in the local socio-economic
area they're in. It's easy to move between categories. Poverty vs. poor could
be as much as $20 to make rent this month.

Having grown up pretty poor, and having relatives shift in and out of poverty
(American style), there's a qualitative difference I think.

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gizmo686
What does it mean to be "not getting by" vs "getting by".

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sounds
I'll list a few examples, but please remember each person's situation is
unique and "not getting by" could just mean facing a mental health issue
(bipolar comes to mind). I guess what I'm saying is, even this attempt to
enumerate some financial examples clearly misses the bigger picture of
physical health (and associated costs), mental health (and associated costs),
social problems, etc.

1\. Guy just got fired from his job because he told his boss to stop altering
time sheets, removing hours worked thus lower wages. When he went to the Dept
of Labor they "couldn't help him" because he hadn't come to them first before
getting fired.

So he got a lawyer but that just burned through his cash reserve; when the
cash ran out the lawyer walked out. He's now living out of his car even though
he got another job. He's probably blacklisted by a lot of the jobs he's used
to. When his current job pays him in 2 weeks, he can make a deposit on a place
and maybe start renting again. In the meantime he struggles to find a place to
shower each day.

2\. Girl finally emancipated herself from a bad adoptive parent situation.
She's 16 and emotionally mature enough to live on her own. She's currently at
a women's shelter but they are working with her to secure an apartment.
Apartment managers refuse to consider her because "she doesn't have a parent's
signature." She has a job at a pizza place but keeps getting turned down for
better paying jobs because she's still in high school. How is she going to
make rent for the next 2 years? Making pizzas?

3\. Guy splitting rent with some friends who get into drugs and stop paying
him. Since the apartment is technically in his name, he gets thrown in county
jail for a few days when the cops bust the drug thing. He is clean so they let
him go but the apartment insists he move out, like, yesterday. So technically
he's homeless even though he has a stable job. When he goes to get another
apartment they all want to know where he has stayed for the last 2 years
(standard apartment procedure) and when they talk to the apartments where he
was, they always get enough of an earful from the previous manager that they
decide he's not worth it. Financially he's making it through all this but
imagine if he were just barely making it... could be enough to push him out
onto the street.

Sleeping in your car is particularly bad because a lot of local law
enforcement will ticket you or throw you in jail for a night. They really
don't want you sleeping in your car around here. The risk is that they might
impound your car after enough tickets. Now you're really "not getting by."

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msgilligan
It looks like the map measures poverty by income in dollars without any cost-
of-living adjustments. So it may be more of a map of regional cost-of-living
than anything else.

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jds375
Exactly. That's why some of the rural areas (Alaska, Dakotas) look so bad and
some of the bigger urban areas (New York) don't.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
The worst-off counties in South Dakota match up pretty well with Indian
reservations, and it should be a surprise to nobody (and a shame to everybody)
how poor the people are there.

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crazy1van
A great guide for which neighborhoods to not live in. I know it's sad. But I
also know I'm not the only person who thought this.

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taproot
I think I've seen this map before...

[http://xkcd.com/1138/](http://xkcd.com/1138/)

As in, was this normalized, both for population density, and cost of living:
read look at alaska..

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warfangle
Absolutely not applicable when brought down to the census tract level in large
cities. Compare, for example, the percentage living below poverty line in
Manhattan (density of 27,227.1/km2) with the percentage living below poverty
line in Brooklyn (density of 14,037/km2).

~~~
taproot
> when brought down to the census tract level in large cities

Which is exactly the same with any population heat map when you go down to the
census tract level in large cities.

In other words, it is completely applicable.

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zone411
This map is more detailed: [http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-San-
Francisco-Calif...](http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-San-Francisco-
California.html#mapOSM?mapOSM\[zl\]=9&mapOSM\[c1\]=37.780483978703025&mapOSM\[c2\]=-121.73538208007811&mapOSM\[s\]=3&mapOSM\[fs\]=true)
(down to the block group level) and it has additional information, such as
change since the year 2000.

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jchung
Just to calibrate: anything above 30% is considered a high-poverty area by
foundations.

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vacri
A bizarre use of a 'heat map', where the brighter colour means the lesser
value. It kind've almost double-negatives itself semantically, but I had to
reorient myself as to what was going on.

~~~
warfangle
Higher saturation, perhaps, but definitely not brighter.

Being that the intention of this map is to bring attention to census tracts
with higher percentages of poverty (instead of bringing attention to census
tracts with a lower percentage of poverty), a cooler color (associative with
'lower') with saturation increases (associative with 'pay attention to this')
seems to be the way to go.

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sdoowpilihp
An interesting point to note is that a large majority, though not all, of the
areas with the highest poverty rates seem to overlap with indian reservations.

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msoad
Why Stanford CA is so poor? It's in middle of Palo Alto!

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msgilligan
Students.

~~~
Bulkington
Professors.

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beedogs
Kinda strange how the most-impoverished states are the ones that vote
Republican all the time. It's odd how they've gotten poor voters to act
against their own best interests by electing the party most likely to screw
them over.

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turgenev
This is a trite and stupid meme that needs to die. Let's look at Alabama, for
example. You see those darkest counties? They overwhelmingly vote for
Democrats at the national level. The same is true for Mississippi and other
southern states. (I'd have to look at data for outside the region since I'm
less acquainted with the politics & demographics of other parts of the
country.)

Now click the other map that shows absolute numbers of people living below the
poverty line and you will find the majority of people in poverty live in
either so-called blue states or Democrat strongholds within "red" states.

Now crawl back to Reddit with your sanctimonious and paternalistic drivel.

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beedogs
Funny how two brand new accounts were created just to downvote and insult me.

Didn't know the GOP was astroturfing HN now, too.

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turgenev
You could [1] see it as a testament to the idiocy of your remark that two
lurkers were finally roused to register in order to rebut it.

1\. But of course you wouldn't.

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beedogs
Nah, I'll see it for what it is: two imbeciles (or, more than likely, one
individual imbecile who registered two accounts) nitpicking.

