Young children living in poverty experience unique barriers to food access, stable housing, employment, healthcare, and social support. These barriers can hinder a child’s ability to achieve academic success. In addition, children living below the poverty line may struggle with finding stable and substantial employment as adults.
Louisville currently ranks 9th among its peer cities in child poverty among older children, with 20.7% of children between the ages of 5 to 17 living in poverty. In 2017, the poverty line was $16,240 for a family of two and $24,600 for a family of four.
Louisville is in the middle 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 are a group that lags behind its peers on this indicator.
Although Louisville ranks 9th out of 17 cities in child poverty rates, child poverty varies substantially within the city. There are more children, ages 5-17, in poverty west of I-65. In the map to the left, areas with high rates of child poverty are purple, and areas with average to low rates are white.
Child poverty is most concentrated in Louisville’s western and downtown neighborhoods. Portland and Russel have the highest rates of child poverty at 67% and 66%. 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 below the peer city mean. Concerted efforts to eradicate child poverty could create a foundation that would place Louisville in the top tier of cities for generations to come.
The percentage of children ages 5 to 17 in poverty is currently higher in all peer cities than it was in 2000. Since the end of the Great Recession, child poverty in Louisville has decreased faster than the peer average. The most improved city since 2000 is St. Louis, which only saw an increase in child poverty among ages 5 to 17 of 2.5 percentage points. Poverty among children in Louisville increased by 4 percentage points over the same timeframe.
There percentage of Black children ages 5 to 17 in poverty is almost four times as high as the percentage of White children ages 5 to 17 in poverty. This gap has persisted over time. Child poverty for ages 5 to 17 among both White and Black children is higher in Louisville than their respective peer means.
The percentage of female children ages 5 to 17 is below their peer mean, and male children are approximately at their peer mean. The percentage of males ages 5 to 17 in poverty is higher than that of females of the same age.
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.
