Poverty makes it difficult for individuals and communities to thrive. Its effects are felt not only in the wallet, but in every barrier to health and well-being. In combination with other barriers, poverty prevents households from achieving security, prosperity and their full potential.
Louisville ranks 7th among its peer cities in the percentage of residents in poverty. Thirteen point seven percent of Louisvillians live in poverty .
Louisville is in the middle cluster of its peer group 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 lag behind their peers on this indicator.
West End residents are more likely to live in poverty than residents in other areas of the city. Poverty rates in eastern Louisville tend to fall below 10%, while poverty rates in the Russell neighborhood are over 80%.
Scroll over the map to see values for each census tract. Zoom in to see street names that form the boundaries of each tract.
Since 2012, Louisville’s poverty rate has fallen below the peer mean. Louisville’s poverty rate is currently one percentage point lower than the peer average.
All peer cities saw an increase in poverty from 2000 to 2016. Indianapolis is the least improved peer city, with poverty increasing by eight percentage points. Oklahoma City is the most improved city within the peer group, with poverty increasing by only one percentage point. The poverty rate in Louisville has increased by two percentage points and currently falls below both the peer mean and that of the most improved city.
The poverty gap between Black and White residents persists. There are about three times as many Black residents in poverty as White residents. The poverty rate among Black Louisville residents is higher than their peer mean, while the poverty rate among White Louisville residents is slightly above their peer mean.
Since 2011, the percentage of both males and females in Louisville has fallen below their respective peer means. That said, the gap between the percentage of male and females in poverty persists. Across peer cities, more females live in poverty than males. The percentage of males and females in poverty is decreasing in the peer city group.
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.
