[PRCo] Re: [PRCo]

[Fred Schneider]

NO REASON, HERB, TO SCRATCH HEADS.  The methods for deriving poverty  
thresholds and the number of people in poverty are all public  
knowledge.   Look at the links below.

http://www.ocpp.org/poverty/how.htm

http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/05poverty.shtml

The first link leads to a definition of how the poverty numbers are  
created or derived.   Once we have determined what poverty is, i.e.  
how many dollars you need to be out of poverty, then you can easily  
update that every year for any area because we know from tax return  
data or employer wage data what people in that city or county or MSA  
earn in any given year and we can easily count the number of familiy  
units that have earnings below the povery threshold (or let a  
computer do it for us).   Some states are easier than others ...  
Pennsylvania, for example, requires employers to report all wage and  
employment data by social security number for the unemployment  
insurance program which gives a vast amount of data for statistical  
information.  It would not tell anything about you per se but it  
could be used collectively to provide information about the entire  
population of any area as long as it did not disclose information  
about any one person or family.

The second link shows what the poverty values are in 2005 for  
families of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and more people.   It starts with  
somewhere over $11,000 for a family of one.

Remember that those poverty numbers were the percent of people in  
poverty --- 31% I think it was for Cleveland.  Columbus was half that  
number.   That does not surprise me at all.   State capital cities  
are usually dominated by government and lobbyist employment with  
little factory employment to screw things up, and therefore the  
poverty numbers tend to be better.  Look at the list ... the capital  
cities that are large enough to list rank 8 (Atlanta), 23  
(Washington), 30 (Phoenix), 32 (Ok City), 34 (Columbus), 38 (Austin),  
40 (St. Paul ... and it has less poverty than Minneapolis), 44  
(Nashville), 47 (Indianapolis), 50 (Sacramento), 52 (Honolulu), 53  
(Denver), 62 (Raleigh) and now we're into cities too small to bother  
with.   I could expect Trenton to have high poverty for a state  
capital because it was a manufacturing city that has lost all its  
industry but most of them had no industry.

I suspect that you might have answered the issue of poverty in  
Cleveland when you came up with the large Spanish and Black  
numbers.   Pittsburgh just doesn't have that kind of a population.    
It may also be that a lot of Cleveland's money is going back to  
Mexico???   That would affect bank deposits.   If the people in  
Cleveland are only there for part of a year and go home to Mexico,  
that could also affect the income numbers, could it not ... in effect  
it would create a man with a part-time job and make him look like a  
person in poverty.    Of course, if that is what is happening, the  
Mayor would love it because think of all the Federal funds he can get  
because of it!

fws3



On Jan 31, 2007, at 9:59 PM, Herb Brannon wrote:

> People here are scratching their collective heads and wondering how  
> those poverty figures were arrived at. It seems like any other  
> large Northern city to me. Even in the hardcore ghetto-type  
> neighborhoods there are scores of  new businesses and houses/ 
> apartments recently completed (last 2-3 years) or under  
> construction. Many think this may have been done to get some extra  
> government assistance for renewal. It is a mystery to me how this  
> statistic was arrived at, or why.
>
> Cleveland is the largest metropolitan area in Ohio both in  
> population and area. Columbus is the largest city in Ohio when one  
> considers the population only INSIDE the city limits. I prefer to  
> use the metro figures inasmuch as the wheel and spokes (the  
> suburbs) cannot exist with the hub (the central city). It is  
> noteworthy that Cleveland's median income is nearly the same as  
> Pittsburgh's. Yet, Cleveland is ranked number one in poverty while  
> Pittsburgh is way down the list at thirty-seven. Go figure! Or,  
> maybe the federal government should go figure !!
> Herb Brannon
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 9:16:13 PM
> Subject: [PRCo]
>
>
> http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/Ranking/2003/R01T160.htm
>
> http://bea.gov/bea/newsrel/MPINewsRelease.htm
>
>
> My old friend Bill Vigrass, native Clevelander, mentioned that
> Cleveland had the most people living in poverty of any city in the
> country.  Being an old statistician, I had to look for the numbers.
> The two URLs above provide somewhat conflicting information.   One
> shows cities and one shows metropolitan statistical areas.  An MSA is
> a city of 50,000 or more people and the counties around it that have
> been linked to the core city and to each other by commuting to work
> patterns.   Those patterns are reestablished and changed if needed
> after each census, i.e. 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, etc.   So
> the city data is just that ... the area within the city boundary.
> The MSA is the city and counties around it ... the suburbs, farms,
> what have you until you run out of people commuting into the city and
> then on to the nearest county line.   In my part of the country, the
> line between Lancaster and Chester counties is an arbitrary boundary
> for the end of the Philadelphia MSA because that is were the magic
> share of commuters drops below the threshold needed but it is still
> traffic and commuters and well, you get the picture.   But the north
> edge of Los Angeles County, California along I-5 near Lancaster is in
> the desert with nothing around.
>
> The first form does show that Cleveland has 31.3 percent of its
> citizens living in poverty, the highest of ANY CITY FOR WHICH SUCH
> DATA ARE COLLECT.   Note that only 68 cities are large enough to
> collect data.   Newark is second, Detroit is third, Fresno is fourth
> (I suspect a lot of migrant workers), Miami is fifth (at the risk of
> sounding bigoted, I am going to suggest a lot of immigrant Cubans,
> Mexicans, Puerto Ricans -- 66% of the population, 22% black, and very
> skewed to young and old -- 20% under 20 and 20% over 62).
> Philadelphia is 10th.  Buffalo is 12th, farther down the list than I
> would have believed from looking at the place.  [It's sort of like
> the blind men describing the elephant.   I guess I didn't pat enough
> of the elephant to understand it.]     PITTSBURGH IS WAY DOWN THE
> LIST AT 37TH IN SPITE OF ALL THE MILL CLOSURES.   I suspect that Herb
> Brannon helped to explain that when he told me that Cleveland has a
> heavy Spanish immigrant population and Pittsburgh simply has an
> elderly non-immigrant population ... fewer kids and more older
> people.  Why?   Believe it or not, per capita income tends to rise
> with older people because the kids are gone and you thus have few
> people to divide into the total number of dollars.
>
> The second URL is area family income.   The most recent Cleveland -
> Elyria-Mentor figure was $35,542.   Pittsburgh is slightly higher at
> $36,208.   Johnstown is $26,780.   And the national average was
> $36,048.  The fact that Pittsburgh MSA's population averages about
> 2.5 years older than Cleveland's might be sufficient to account for
> the higher per capita income in Pittsburgh.   I'm not going to commit
> myself to a precise answer,
>