The Faces of Poverty in North Carolina by Gene R. Nichol

Author:Gene R. Nichol [Nichol, Gene R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Poverty & Homelessness, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Political Science, Public Policy, Economic Policy
ISBN: 9781469666174
Google: 3c4qEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2021-11-01T04:25:08+00:00

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2012–2016 American Community Survey

Graph 17. Median household income, Wilkes County, 1969–2016

Note: All in 2016 dollars

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census; 2006–2010, 2010–2014, and 2012–2016 American Community Survey

Graph 18. Poverty rate by decade, Wilkes County, 1970–2016

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census; 2006–2010, 2010–2014, and 2012–2016 American Community Survey

Poverty, of course, echoes income. One-fifth of Wilkes residents, in total, live below the federal poverty threshold. Almost a third of all children are poor. The rate is even higher for black and Hispanic kids. The county’s poverty rate is demonstrably higher than North Carolina’s rate for children, adults, seniors, women, and men. It wasn’t always so. During the 1980s and 1990s, the state and county poverty rates were roughly equivalent. In the mid-2000s, Wilkes County’s poverty rate began to climb rapidly. By 2014, the county rate exceeded the state’s by almost seven percentage points.

Five percent of full-time, year-round workers in Wilkes County live in poverty (North Carolina’s rate is 3.5 percent). Twenty-seven percent of part-time or part-year workers are impoverished (compared with 23 percent in North Carolina). Almost half of the population (47 percent) of Wilkes County earns less than 200 percent of the federal poverty standard, a rough measure of the working poor.

Housing in Wilkes County is typically older than that of the state. The county and state have about the same proportion of houses constructed before 1950, but 44 percent of North Carolina’s housing was built after 1990. In Wilkes the figure is 31 percent. Thus a significant portion of the county’s housing stock is entering its fourth or fifth decade. Wilkes also has a much higher share of mobile homes (27 percent) than the state (13 percent). And in some census tracts, the mobile home rate climbs to over a third of all housing units. About 51 percent of renters in Wilkes pay more that 30 percent of their income for housing. While the number of affordable units has increased since 2000, it has barely kept pace with the expansion in the number of extremely low-income households (making 30 percent or less of area median income), which has almost tripled during that period.5

Graph 19. Age-adjusted drug poisoning deaths per 100,000, by county

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