It’s essentially non-existent at the county level in some regions, and hardly uncommon in others
By Colin Woodard
There are impoverished places in the United States, and then there are places that stay impoverished, generation after generation, creating cycles of poverty that are difficult to escape. When you plot them on the map, the geographic divides are clear and striking, especially if you use the American Nations model of regional cultures, as we do at Nationhood Lab.
The federal government defines a place as suffering from persistent poverty if it has a poverty rate of 20 percent or higher for four consecutive periods about a decade apart, a period spanning approximately 30 years. In 2023, the U.S. Census Bureau identified 314 counties that meet that definition, or just over one in ten. Only three of those counties are located in Yankeedom, the sprawling region first colonized by Puritan New Englanders and their descendants. Not a single one is located in the Left Coast, a region of 21 million people extending along the narrow Pacific coastal plain from south-central California to the southern Alaska panhandle. However, in other places – Appalachian coal country, El Norte’s borderlands, and across the Deep Southern lowlands – they’re clumped together in dozens.
A lot of the afflicted counties are rural and sparsely populated, so to allow fair comparisons across the American Nations, we calculated the percentage of each region’s population that lives in a county with persistent poverty. The results, in the map at this top of this post, are striking. On one extreme, you have Left Coast, Spanish Caribbean and Hawaii (part of Greater Polynesia) where nobody lives in a persistent poverty county, plus Yankeedom where only 0.1% do; on the other you have Deep South (14.1%), New Netherland (20.1%), New France (29.3%) and First Nation, where a majority – 55.6% of residents – live in such a place. Between these poles are Far West (3.3%), Tidewater (5.8%), the Midlands (6.4%) and El Norte (10.9%).
You’ll notice these rankings don’t match typical pattern. Often, the large regions with a strong, centuries-old commitment to communitarian values – which tend to have stronger regulations, a more active government, and greater investments in public goods and social programs – have the healthiest metrics, whether you’re looking at life expectancy, gun deaths, COVID-19 morbidity, intergenerational mobility or household debt and creditworthiness. Regions with an individualistic orientation tend to have systems with low taxes, sparse services, and lax regulations and do badly on these metrics. (First Nation – where indigenous people never lost control over their almost always has catastrophically bad metrics, however.) You can see the regional orientations here:
Curiously, if you look at just people living in rural counties, the pattern is largely restored, with all the individualistic “nations,” First Nation and passively communitarian El Norte fairing worst. One hundred percent of New France’s rural county residents live in afflicted counties, as do nearly three-quarters of El Norte’s. In the Midlands, it’s just 1.2%. In Yankeedom, the afflicted counties – Isabella (MI), Menominee (WI) and Roberts (SD) – account for less than 1% of the region’s rural population.
Here’s the pattern when you look only at urban counties, those that were in Categories 1 to 4 of the federal government’s six-tiered classification system of 2013, which we’ve used in all Nationhood Lab analysis to date.
Notice Yankeedom has no urban counties with persistent poverty, despite being home to a lot of economically (and often racially) divided metro areas, including Boston, New Haven-Bridgeport, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Gary, Indiana, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Chicago (which it shares with the Midlands). By contrast, more than a fifth of New Netherland’s urban residents live in its persistent poverty counties: Bronx and King’s (that’s Brooklyn.) Urban Greater Appalachia performs quite well, with only 1.2% of residents living in persistent poverty counties, compared to 16.4% of its rural residents. The urban Midlands – home to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Saint Louis – has only slightly better numbers than the Deep South.
What’s this all mean? For regions with lots of people living in and around chronic poverty, it means a lot of children starting their lives in hardship and, according to the academic literature, much more likely to experience myriad bad outcomes as adults, including food insecurity, developmental issues, unsafe living conditions, increased risks of violence and incarceration, and lower wages. All of that is expensive for society, whether to provide emergency room care, prison beds, or for children whose parents can’t take care of them. Nationally, the economic costs of childhood poverty alone were estimated in 2018 to be $1.03 trillion annually, or about 5.4% of our entire Gross Domestic Product, and today’s costs for persistent poverty overall would be higher than that.
How do you improve the situation? Researchers Yoonzie Chung and Kathryn Maguire-Jack, social workers at the University of Maryland and University of Michigan respectively, recently found government assistance plays a critical role in escaping persistent poverty and reducing intergenerational poverty, but those programs are especially weak in states effectively controlled by Deep South, New France and Greater Appalachia, where most of the worst affected counties are located. (Most of El Norte’s persistent poverty counties are in Texas, which is controlled by its Greater Appalachia and Deep South sections.) Not helping children and families escape intergenerational poverty isn’t actually saving anyone money.
As for New Netherland and the Midlands, the problem is concentrated in just a handful of densely populated, racially diverse places: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Philadelphia County, Baltimore City, and St. Louis City. These won’t be easy fixes. Urban segregation has a deep legacy in the Midlands and New Netherland has always been at peace with inequality. But everyone in these cities and regions would be better off if they were.
Thanks to Motivf’s Tova Perlman for rendering this CDC/USDA data and Aimee Trehey for creating the maps.
— Colin Woodard, author of Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America and American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, is director of Nationhood Lab.