Hunger Awareness Month: Poverty and hunger are closer than you think

Image courtesy of ShadowWolfZ

Quiet leafy streets, green lawns, houses with garages – the symbols of middle and upper class security. This was once the common image of American suburbia.

More and more, it is no longer the reality.

Recent news reports showing that the majority of Pittsburgh’s poor are in the suburbs, and similar findings across the U.S. are beginning to help advance our understanding that all poverty is not in stereotypical communities of inner cities or barren rural landscapes.

Fifteen percent of the people in this country are poor. That’s the official word from the U.S. Census Bureau for the most recent data they have reported.

Poverty is highly concentrated in some areas, of course. Census data show 13 counties around the country with poverty rates of 40% or more. All are rural communities, either in the Dakotas or the South.

The dubious distinction of the highest-poverty county in America belongs to Ziebach County, South Dakota, which lies entirely within the barren land of two Native American Reservations. Although it is 2.5 times the size of Allegheny County, only 2,800 people live there – about the same as Aspinwall.

Half the people in Ziebach County are poor, an even higher poverty rate than the 43% of Braddock, Allegheny County’s poorest community.

Poverty is concentrated, but it can also be found where you least expect it:

Fox Chapel? 6.1% poverty rate
Mount Lebanon? 5.0%
Upper St. Clair? Even where poverty is about as invisible as it gets in Allegheny County, 1.8% of its 19,000 people are poor. That’s about 342 people, if you are keeping score.

Just Harvest has assembled a list from the state welfare department of the number of food stamp recipients in each zip code in our area. Look for yours and see how many of your neighbors are struggling.

Poverty might be closer than you think.

Be a part of the solution