The New York Time published a web app that maps poverty levels by county across the U.S. It also maps data by census tracts for several major U.S. cities. Striking. Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/05/poverty-map/
2 thoughts on “Mapping Poverty”
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Often times the ways that homeless people survive is by coping in unhealthy ways. In “Voices of the Street” the chapter “Recovery Issues” discusses the relationships with homeless people and addictions. One homeless man shares, “homelessness and drug abuse and alcoholism go hand in hand” (144). Many of the homeless people interviewed share how, “drugs and alcohol took away the pain of their experiences and helped pass the time” (151). Homeless people are trying to survive and their means of surviving are limited. They are acting as a result of their desperate circumstance. It is their circumstance that influences their behavior. What would you do in order to survive the traumatic experience of being homeless?
Also, why do you think “poverty is so invisible?” In what ways have the homeless become invisible?
This website is so eye-opening for me. It shows just how many people are in poverty in each section of the US. I am from Boise, Idaho and when I clicked on my county, which is tiny compared to most Californian counties, I was not expecting 50,000 people (12.5%) to be in poverty. After seeing that statistic, I tried to picture that many people walking around my hometown. I find it so amazing that poverty is so invisible and that so many people (including myself) try to just ignore any signs of it. Those 50,000 people in my county serve me food, sell me things I don’t need, and ask me for money when I walk by them. Every one of those people has a different story and background and are stuck in a rut that they can’t get out of no matter how hard they work.
Even though 50,000 seems like a lot for my small town, when compared to L.A. county it’s nothing. There are over 1.8 million people in poverty in L.A. county (19.1%). The population of Idaho is 1.5 million people. There is an entire state’s worth of people struggling to survive in just one county of California. And the rates of poverty are even higher (almost 50%) in several counties throughout the U.S. It’s unimaginable how we have let it get to the point where half of the population of an area is barely making it through each day. When we all tried to budget a poverty-stricken single parent family’s life in class the other day, I think we all realized how hard it is in real life to survive on minimum wage. There is no way that people living below the poverty line can thrive. They merely survive, and barely manage to do even that.