Brought to you by WBIW News and Network Indiana
Last updated on Wednesday, October 5, 2011
(BLOOMINGTON) - For the second time in four years, Bloomington has been deemed one of the poorest cities in America. Bloomington it the nation’s third-poorest city with a population of 65,000 or more.
Reading, Pa. with a 41.3 percent rate and Flint, Mich., with a 41.2 rate, had higher poverty rates.
Nearly 40 percent of Bloomington residents are living in poverty, according to a recently released report by the U.S. Census Bureau, which includes Indiana University students in its Bloomington figures.
The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,050. A single person making less than $10,830 a year is said to be in poverty.
The report shows that poverty in the city of Bloomington in 2010 was 39.9 percent , slightly lower than its 41.6 percent rate in 2009.
However those numbers may be inflated because IU students either have no income, or small paychecks from part-time jobs. More than half of Bloomington's 81,000 residents are IU students.
The Census Bureau report found that the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line last year was 15.1 percent, the highest level since 1993, but far below Bloomington's figures. The poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,050.
The report also showed that another 2.6 million people in the U.S. slipped into poverty last year, and the number of Americans living below the poverty line - 46.2 million people - was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing such figures.
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