[PRCo]

[Fred Schneider]

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,