Multidimensional Poverty

The effects of poverty are not just on the wallet, but in every barrier to health and wellbeing. The multidimensional poverty index reflects the fact that individuals experience poverty in multiple forms: low income, poorer health, unemployment, low education, and living in a poor neighborhood. These factors are not additive–each experienced factor multiplies the barriers to success for an individual in poverty. In order to address the complex issue of poverty, efforts to effect positive change must be coherent with the notion that poverty is caused by multiple, confounding factors.

Peer City Perspective

Louisville currently ranks 15th among its peers in rates of multidimensional poverty with 14.5% of residents living in multidimensional poverty. The multidimensional poverty index evaluates poverty through four dimensions: low income (150% of the poverty line), unemployment, lack of health insurance, and lack of a high school degree. A neighborhood is determined to be in multidimensional poverty if its average z-score across all four factors is greater than 1.

On this metric, Louisville ranks among the bottom tier of its peers according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.

Where is multidimensional poverty concentrated?

Levels of multidimensional poverty vary greatly across the city. The neighborhoods with the highest level of multidimensional poverty are Russell and Portland. One of the tracts in the Portland neighborhood also has a very high level of multidimensional poverty, though it is offset by other tracts with lower levels of multidimensional poverty. The neighborhoods with the least multidimensional poverty are Floyd’s Fork, Northeast Jefferson, and the Highlands.

Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each tract.

Continue Exploring with Related Data

Poverty Beyond Income Report

Racial Geography

Unemployment

Children Ages 0-17 in Poverty

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

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

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.