Urban Poverty In America

Poverty, the state of being extremely poor, exists all over America! There are several different types of poverty, and the causes of poverty. Most people think of poverty as just somebody who is homeless and has no job, somebody who has no money to support the basic needs of life, and wears ragged clothing and lives under a bridge. What people don’t know is there are people living in poverty that have jobs and make money but live so poorly that they are categorized with people that live in absolute poverty.

Poverty has always been with us from beggars outside the gates of Jerusalem to the mentally ill homeless woman in the park. America is known for our huge difference in culture and class. This is due partly to the dynamics behind the political decisions of this country. The president himself admits that America is more unequal than it’s been since the great depression and many of his own supporters say he has failed. America now has, by many standards, the lowest social mobility of all of the high-end countries, meaning that a child born into poverty is likely to grow up as a poor adult. This is surprising for a country that not only prides itself as being a middle class society, but as the society where anyone can make it and where

staggering? Poverty occurs when a person’s need for food, clothing and shelter are not being

Public housing is another program that helps to provide a roof over a family’s heads for reduced costs. Rent in some places can be quite high and a family of four may find it hard even to afford a small 3 bedroom house without breaking their pockets.

Poverty plagues the entire nation. People assume that the worst of poverty is in the midst of heavily populated areas such as New York or California. What they don’t realize is that poverty rates in Grand Forks are worse than the average poverty rates in the entire nation. And it isn’t just a slight increase, poverty rates in Grand Forks County are 150% worse than the national average. The poverty rates are ridiculous, yet there are only a few articles in the Grand Forks Herald that actually focus on poverty. I researched through the Grand Forks Herald database and came up with less than ten articles in the past 5 years that focused on poverty in the area. That’s a maximum of ten articles in 1,825 days. This report focuses on the effects that

According to the Census Bureau 25.6 percent of White Center residence live in poverty, which is greater than the national average. A leading cause of poverty is not having access to higher education. I believe this is a problem because children are the ones affected most by poverty. According to the Census Bureau, 42.4 percent of children in White Center under the age of 5 and 49% of 16 to 17 year olds live in poverty. The families that face the most poverty are single female households with no husband present, at 51.3 percent. Unemployment is a leading cause of poverty. The unemployment rate at White Center, WA 26% higher than the national average. I believe this is a problem that needs to be addressed because housing prices in the Seattle

According to Elizabeth Kneebone, author of “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America”, the growth of suburban poverty is partly due to the dark economic situations that forced people beneath “the line” and by migration. She added that most low-wage jobs in America are in the suburbs, and that people mistakenly believe that more services are offered in the suburbs than in the cities. Looking at the fast-growing poor population in the suburbs, this phenomenon has become a community situation where anyone is susceptible of. Furthermore, it indicates that there needs to be a synergistic, universal change to better the situation (the government and organizations should change as well).

Upon arriving to the Poverty simulation, I did not know what to expect. After being able to interact with my peers to understand what it was like to be living in poverty, I got a better understand of what it entails. I quickly wanted to know what the rate of poverty was in Greensboro alone. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, they estimated 268,232 people whose status is poverty in 2013. 29% of that estimate are subjects who are under 18 years old. Out of 268,323, females are about 141,000 of it. The top two races that tend to hold a poverty status are Caucasian and African Americans. The problem at hand is that this status is nationwide.

There is an issue in the United States that a large portion of the population is either choosing to ignore or is simply naïve to the facts. I am a firm believer that poverty is directly associated to education. Research has backed this theory as it shows that 53% of those classified in upper class are college graduates compared to only 15% of whom identify as lower class (Parker, 2012). While there has been a lot of research conducted on who the upper class are and what the lower class need in order to bring themselves out of poverty there has been little to no change in funding practices of public education. If the end state goal of public education is to produce our countries future why are Americans not taking a more aggressive financial

Geographical concentrated pockets of poverty is a worldwide phenomenon. In the United States, during late 1980s and start of 1990s, Wilson (1987) was the first one who critically analyzed this phenomenon in his book “The Truly Disadvantaged” and later attempts were made by Massey and Eggers in 1990, Massey and Denton in 1993, and Jargowsky and Jo Bane in 1991 among other researchers (Kazempiurm 2000, p. 369).

What is poverty? Poverty is not simply a matter of low income flow. Poverty can be generally categorized as the state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/poverty). There are two types of Absolute poverty where individuals have no access to the basic necessities in life including food, water, clothing, shelter and Relative poverty occurs when people do not enjoy a certain minimum level of living standards as determined by a government that vary from country to country, sometimes within the same country (Brunswick and Canada, 2010).

Poverty is a complex societal issue, which includes social, economic and political elements. It is a lack of necessary means to fulfil basic human needs including food, shelter, clothing etc. The U.S. Census Bureau defines poverty as living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of its poverty threshold. Official poverty rates in the US as estimated by the Bureau is 12.7 percent for 2016. Official measures concluded that 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty that year, nearly 1 in every 6 people. The measure is based on information provided from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. The survey is sent to U.S. households, so the poverty estimates do not include those who are homeless. (Semega,

Blacks experienced the highest poverty rate, at 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2009, and Hispanics rose to 26 percent from 25 percent. For whites, 9.9 percent lived in poverty, up from 9.4 percent in 2009. Asians were unchanged at 12.1 percent.” (Tavernise, 2011)

This review is formulated with scholarly sources and references based off of poverty in America. This disclosure is approached with a value free sociological approach, and it will give insight on the social causes of poverty and the effects it has on America. Poverty is a very controversial topic. Many will assume that people living in poverty are lazy, made bad life decisions, or that they are solely the reason for their predicament however, people living in poverty would argue that their are deeper issues for it. Poverty will be deeply explained and researched from both perspectives

Poverty has been on a incline since the economic downturn in 2007. Poverty is defined as “the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount”, but a more modern definition used today is “in state of being extremely poor”. According to “Poverty in the United States” a report done by Congressional Digest, the poverty line in 2012 was 15.0 percent, which represents 46.5 million people living at or below the poverty line, and was 2.7 points higher in this year than in 2007. The article also stated that in 2012, the family poverty rate and the number of families in poverty was 11.8 percent and 9.5 million and the median income for households was $51,017, which means many of these households have students who become eligible for free lunches. In Lindsey Layton’s article “Most Public