The city of Baton Rouge has emerged as Louisiana’s new center of concentrated poverty, surpassing New Orleans. A study by independent research group The Brookings Institution found the concentrated poverty rate grew by roughly 22% in Baton Rouge in the past decade, while declining nearly 12% in the city of New Orleans.
Close to half of Baton Rouge’s low-income population lives clustered in 13 “extreme poverty” areas, defined as U.S. census tracts with poverty rates of 40% or more. By comparison, a quarter of New Orleans’ poorer residents live in such areas. Though New Orleans still has more extreme poverty tracts than Baton Rouge—29, to be exact—it has shed 17 such areas since 2005, while Baton Rouge has gained six.
Baton Rouge now ranks fifth among the nation’s 100 largest cities for its concentrated poverty rate, while New Orleans ranks 30th. The Capital City also earned the unfortunate distinction of being the community with the eighth fastest-growing rate of concentrated poverty among the nation’s largest cities, while New Orleans’ rate of change puts it at No. 78.
In raw numbers, Baton Rouge has 45,515 people living in extreme poverty tracts. By comparison, New Orleans has 38,249 people living in such regions.
While this Brookings study doesn’t specify the reasons for Baton Rouge’s growing rate of poverty, lead researcher Elizabeth Kneebone says the city shouldn’t be too quick to lay the blame solely on the population shifts that inevitably followed Hurricane Katrina.
“We can’t see directly what is driving these trends—if it is people moving into the region, or those living in the region becoming poorer,” she says. “We know what a devastating effect the hurricane had on the poorest neighborhoods, and we know Baton Rouge was a big receiver of people from New Orleans, so that might reflect some of this data. But we also know we just came out of a decade where there were two downturns in the economy and the typical household income fell, which may have pushed some residents into poverty. So this could also be reflecting things that are happening in the regional economy and in Baton Rouge.”
Other dynamics may be at play as well, Kneebone says, such as greater numbers of higher-income people moving out of the city, leaving lower-income residents behind to create these extreme poverty clusters. Or the total population may be declining faster than the poor population, leaving a net gain of low-income residents.
“There are these other dynamics that may be pushing the numbers up or pushing the numbers down,” the researcher says. “There could be other economic factors as well.”
The Capital City’s suburbs, meanwhile, also saw a rise in poverty, though to a much lesser degree. Included in the Baton Rouge metropolitan region are Ascension, East Baton Rouge, East Feliciana, Iberville, Livingston, Pointe Coupee, St. Helena, West Baton Rouge and West Feliciana parishes.
The concentrated poverty rate grew by 7% in those suburbs, compared to 22% in the city of Baton Rouge. However, that still is the fifth fastest-growing rate of concentrated poverty among suburbs in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan regions. According to the Brookings Institute report, those outlying parishes gained 10,770 people living in extreme-poverty tracts.
Not surprisingly, concentrated clusters of poverty bring with them a host of challenges to increasingly cash-strapped cities and suburbs.
Kneebone says such neighborhoods tend to have low-performing schools, fewer job opportunities, higher crime rates and poorer health. Public policy decisions, such as school improvements, affordable housing, transportation access and economic development, are key to ensuring low-income people aren’t isolated in low-opportunity areas.
“Concentrated poverty brings costs for the city in having to deal with these additional challenges,” she says. “The economy becomes critical in determining what direction these trends move in. It’s important that communities work to connect these residents to opportunities that can help them work their way out of poverty.”
Over the 10-year span, the nation saw its poor population grow by 12.3 million, driving the total number of Americans in poverty to a historic high of 46.2 million. By the end of the decade, more than 15% of the nation’s population lived below the federal poverty line—$22,314 for a family of four in 2010. The population living in extreme-poverty neighborhoods rose by one-third. By the end of the decade, 10.5% of poor people nationwide lived in such neighborhoods. To see the Baton Rouge statistics, click here. To see the New Orleans statistics, click here.
