Think Bigg

Where are the poor in America?

On a recent post on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the American Indian Relief Council claimed that 69% of the residents lived below the poverty line. That spurred a question: where are the poorest places in the United States? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t quite as clear-cut as I would like.

The statistics compiled by Reference.com bear out the AIRC claim that Buffalo County and Shannon County, South Dakota are in fact the poorest counties in the United States.

Interestingly, the state with the largest number of counties on the list turned out to be Texas (17). Kentucky followed (16), and Mississippi was third (14).

Here is the list of the top 25 poorest counties in America, ranked according to per capita income, according to Reference.com:

For more (potentially conflicting) information, read on.

Here’s where it gets a bit tricky.

The statistics compiled by Reference.com are supposedly aggregated from data provided by the US Census Bureau, the US Department of Commerce and DataQuick Information Systems.

But when I researched the actual website for the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, Starr, Texas is cited as the county with the lowest per capita personal income:

And according to the US Census Bureau, Hidalgo County, TX has the largest percentage of people living below the poverty line.

The US Census Bureau also reports Detroit, Michigan as the poorest city in America, with approximately 33% of the households living below poverty level.

All three data sources seem to support the assertion that Texas has the largest number of households living below the poverty level. The wholesale omission of the South Dakota counties from the US Census data, however, is an inconsistency I can only assume is related to the process of counting households.
Anyone out there have any other good ideas?