Scott just needed to get to her job interview, but she was finding around her the obstacles that have shaped this region’s increasingly pervasive and isolating form of extreme poverty. In the metropolitan areas of the Deep South, government policies and rising real estate prices have pushed the poor out of urban centers and farther from jobs. Low-income people have, in turn, grown more reliant on public transit networks that are among the weakest of quality in the country. When they search for work, they step into a region where pay tends to be low and unemployment tends to be high. The share of residents in deep poverty — with incomes below $10,045 for a parent and two children — in these Deep South metro areas has grown by 24 percent over the past decade, according to Census Bureau data.

But even as their ranks have grown, the deeply impoverished in the Deep South have also increasingly found that they are on their own: They are less likely to receive the help of a spouse — or the government. Five of the six states with the highest proportion of single parents are in the Deep South. Meanwhile, policymakers have dismantled the cash assistance programs that used to provide critical support for the jobless with children. Those like Scott not only have less access to jobs, but also less of a safety net when they are unemployed.

Scott was starting her latest week with a notebook full of bullet-by-bullet leads and a series of bus rides to follow up on them. Apply to Randstad Staffing, she had written in neat cursive; it was hiring for warehouse positions. Apply to Walmart, she had written just below. Millwood Inc., she had written along with the company’s address — her first stop of the week. Days earlier, she spotted Millwood’s ad on a Facebook page for unemployed Georgians. The company wanted in-person applicants.