Predicament of Poverty: 26% of Louisville’s kids are poor

August 12, 2014
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Results of the recently released KIDS COUNT report show that Kentucky children are disproportionately living in poverty. For a family of four to be considered impoverished, total yearly household income is $23,850 or less. Nationally, about 23% of kids live below the poverty line, but in Kentucky about 27% do, up from 22% in 2005. In Louisville, about 26% of kids are poor.

Poverty status varies considerably by neighborhood. In Louisville’s St. Matthews neighborhood, for example, 14% of kids are poor. In Russell, at the other extreme, nearly 78% of kids live below the poverty line. In fact, in 13 (out of 24 total) Louisville neighborhoods, more than 25% of kids live below the poverty line.

Poverty is associated with numerous social ills, including low educational attainment, poor health, and food insecurity. Poverty causes stress in kids, making concentration in school difficult, and the dropout rate of poor kids is many times greater than the rate among more affluent kids. Kids who live in high-poverty neighborhoods also are more likely to witness and be victims of violence.

Contrary to common stereotypes, many poor people live in households where at least one member is employed. About 3% of full-time workers in Louisville live in a household whose total household income is below the poverty line. This amounts to more than 6200 full-time workers living in poverty in Louisville.  This includes families where more than one person works, and total household income is still below the poverty line. This figure does not include poor part-time workers or full-time workers who make below-poverty wages, but live in a household with other earners, where total household income is above the poverty line. This number does not reflect the large number of full-time workers whose earnings would be below the poverty line if they were the only earner in the household.

The GLP’s focus on Education, 21st Century Jobs, Quality of Place, and Health are clearly related to poverty, as evidence demonstrates its association with educational attainment, employment and wages, and health. In the coming months, as we release data and provide more discussion on Quality of Place and Quality of Life, we will share more data regarding poverty and how Louisville compares to our peer cities.

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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.