A back alley in Austin. Matthew Rutledge/Flickr Southern poverty has grown in an extreme way within America's post-recession landscape, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution.



Of the 15 metro areas where poverty is expanding at the greatest rates, nine are located in the South, with four in North Carolina and another three in Florida.



Metro areas include cities and their surrounding suburbs, where poverty has been expanding fastest.



The Brookings report analyzes the poverty levels in metro areas, examining the change between 2000 and the period of 2008-2012, which includes an average from a five-year Census estimate and shows the effect of the recession.

Business Insider previously looked at the Brookings report to see which U.S. cities had rapidly expanding poor neighborhoods. This analysis looks at the metro areas that saw the biggest overall increases in poverty. To do so, we ranked metro areas based on the change in poor population from 2000 through the 2008-2012 average.

For the year 2013, the Census set the poverty level at $12,119 for a single person under the age of 65 and $24,028 for a family of four.