The poverty gap between rural and metropolitan areas was just as wide in 2019 as the year before, said the Census Bureau on Tuesday. Poverty rates declined across the board last year, but analysts said the pandemic has made the improvements meaningless with the country now in a deep recession.
In an annual report, Census said the rural poverty rate fell to 13.3 percent, from 14.7 percent in 2018. The urban rate was 10 percent, down from 11.3 percent in 2018. The gap between rural and urban residents was 3.3 points compared to 3.4 points in the previous year; rural areas have a population that is older, lower-paid and holds fewer college degrees than urban residents. Median income rose more than twice as fast in metropolitan areas than in rural America.
While the government said the U.S. poverty rate, combining cities, suburbs and rural areas, fell to 10.5 percent in 2019, a drop of 1.3 points, a working paper that accompanied the Census report said the rate probably was 11.1 percent when the lower response rate of the pandemic was taken into account. The paper was titled, “Coronavirus infects surveys too.”
With the arrival of the pandemic, the jobless rate soared; more than 35 million people were unemployed or lived with an unemployed family member in August, said the think tank Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Since the declaration on March 13 of a national coronavirus emergency, the nation has endured the deepest recession since the 1930s, fundamentally altering the economic landscape and making the 2019 findings an inaccurate gauge of current circumstances.”
Eleven percent of adults reported last month that members of their household sometimes or often did not get enough to eat, triple the 2018 figure, said the Food Research and Action Council on Tuesday. “What is more surprising is the extent of hunger. It’s not just the poorest families that are facing this struggle; among those who don’t have enough to eat, 1 in 4 have usual incomes above 450,000 per year,” said FRAC.