Young children living in poverty experience unique barriers to food access, stable housing, healthcare, and social support. In addition, they are at an increased risk of depression, intimate partner violence, and poor health behaviors as they grow older. As a result, children who grow up in poverty experience higher rates of illness and death than children who do not.
Louisville currently ranks 7th among its peer cities with 22.4 percent of children under the age of 18 living in poverty. The poverty line in 2015 was $15,930 for a family of two and $20,090 for a family of three.
Louisville is in the middle of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in Green are a cluster that outperforms their peers, Yellow represents the middle cluster, and Red is a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.
Although Louisville ranks 7th out of 17 cities in child poverty rates, child poverty varies substantially within the city, ranging from 67% in some neighborhoods to 4% in others. In the map to the left, areas with higher rates of child poverty are purple, and areas with lower rates are white.
Child poverty is most concentrated in Louisville’s western and downtown neighborhoods. Russell, California, Smoketown, and Park Hill are several neighborhoods with particularly high rates of child poverty. The lowest rates of child poverty are in Floyd’s Fork, the Highlands, and Northeast Jefferson.
Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each tract.
The child poverty rate in Louisville has been steadily decreasing since 2011. Until then, Louisville traditionally ranked in the bottom 50% of its peer cities. However, Louisville has been reducing child poverty at a faster rate than many of its peer cities over the past 5 years, and it is now ranked just outside the top 25% of its peer cities. Concerted efforts to eradicate child poverty could create a foundation that would place Louisville in the top tier of cities for generations to come.
For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.
Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).
Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.
