New Study Finds Extreme Poverty on the Rise

A study released on Thursday by the Brookings Institution shows that the number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew by a third over the past decade, reported The New York Times.

Neighborhoods of extreme poverty is defined as areas where at least 40 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty line, which in 2010 was $22,300 for a family of four.

More than 10 percent of America’s poor now live in extreme poverty, up from 9.1 percent in the beginning of the decade, erasing most of the gains from the 1990s when concentrated poverty declined.

“It’s the toughest, most malignant poverty that we have in the United States,” said Peter Edelman, the director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy at Georgetown University. “It’s bad outcomes reinforcing each other.”

The number of neighborhoods of extreme poverty grew in roughly three-quarters of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas.