Metro Detroit's poverty gets worse despite city's comeback

A new look at the poorest urban areas in America, despite economic growth and increasing prosperity, puts metro Detroit near the top of the list.

The report — from 24/7 Wall St., a New York-based financial news organization — ranks the Detroit area at No. 5 in a list of impoverished communities. It also raises the question: During such good economic times, why are so many getting left behind?

"There's always this narrative around Detroit which people tend to tell that's either all bad — or all good," said Kurt Metzger, a demographer and founder of Data Driven Detroit, an information analysis organization. "No one wants to go in between."

The 24/7 report pointed out that by many measures, the American economy is booming: Record highs on the stock market, a near two-decade unemployment low, and sustained production growth.

Yet, the share of Americans living below the federal poverty level — annual income of $25,100 for a family of four — is on the rise, climbing to 14.2% in 2016, up from 12.7% in 2010, and the geographical concentration of poverty also has gone up.

"This increased concentration of poverty is far more pronounced in certain metropolitan areas," the report said. "The share of poor residents living in extremely poor neighborhoods — defined as those with a poverty rate of at least 40% — climbed by more than 3.5 percentage points in 20 metro areas in the last six years."

As Metzger put it: "It is becoming the haves and have-nots."

It is no surprise that metro Detroit (defined as a six-county area of Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, and Wayne) was identified as an impoverished area. The region, the report said, has "long been the poster child for economic decline in postindustrial America."

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The City of Detroit became the largest municipality to exit bankruptcy protection in 2014.

Detroit officials say the city is on the rise as Detroit businessman Dan Gilbert builds what is expected to be its tallest skyscraper downtown. Poverty rates in the city, they add, have dropped to 35.7% in 2016, the latest year the data is available, down from 39.8% in 2015.

"While poverty is certainly still too high in the City of Detroit, the rate is going down, not up," said Jeff Donofrio, director of workforce development for the City of Detroit. "Detroit's poverty rate in 2016 was 10% lower than it was just the year before."

The last time the city saw poverty rates this low was a decade ago.

However, the 24/7 report says an increasing share of residents in the metro area are living in poverty, 16.2%, up from 14.4%, and a significant majority of them are living in neighborhoods that are within the City of Detroit.

"We have to celebrate Detroit's comeback, but the comeback is more of a commercial: a downtown, Midtown comeback," said Metzger, who also is the mayor of Pleasant Ridge, a Detroit suburb. "We're seeing more restaurants, and high-end apartments and lofts, and the population stabilize. So, we don't want to say there isn't a lot of good stuff going on."

Yet, he added: "Detroit also still has the highest poverty rate of any major city in the country, and it still has a very undereducated population that is not able to take advantage of the national economic turnaround."

Metro Detroit was ranked behind four other metro areas: Bakersfield, Calif., No. 1; Fresno, Calif., No. 2; Springfield, Mass., No. 3, and Albuquerque, N.M., No. 4.; and ahead of: Youngstown, Ohio, No. 6; Toledo, No. 7; Sacramento, Calif., No. 8; Oklahoma City, No. 9., and Phoenix, No. 10.

The other metro areas identified were: Cleveland, No. 11; Omaha, Neb., No. 12; Scranton, Pa., No. 13; Las Vegas, No. 14; Boise, Idaho, No. 15; Little Rock, Ark., No. 16; Indianapolis, No. 17; Memphis, Tenn., No. 18; Jackson, Miss., No. 19, and Worchester, Mass., No. 20.

"The share of poor residents living in extremely poor neighborhoods — defined as those with a poverty rate of at least 40% — climbed by more than 3.5 percentage points in 20 metro areas in the last six years," the report said. "Such high-poverty neighborhoods are often characterized by high crime rates, low educational attainment rates and high unemployment. Partially as a result, those living in these extremely poor neighborhoods are at a greatly reduced likelihood of success and upward economic mobility."

Still, No. 5 is better than the No. 1 ranking in a report two years ago.

A study by the Brookings Institution in 2016 found metro Detroit — which was defined in that report as a six-county region: including Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston, St. Clair, Lapeer — to have the highest rate of concentrated poverty among the most populous metro areas in America.

That same year, a separate report by the Journal of the American Medical Association found the poorest residents in southeast Michigan have a life expectancy rate significantly lower than the poor of comparable incomes in other major metro areas.

In that report, the poorest residents in southeast Michigan — a 10-county region that included metro Detroit and Flint, which had a contaminated water supply — found residents live, on average, six years fewer than the poorest in metro New York, and the richest residents in southeast Michigan had a life expectancy that was one year less than for the richest residents in metro New York.

"We tend to forget that there's a large segment of the population that can't take advantage of the growing economy," Metzger said. "It's really — with all the efforts to turn around cities —- the hardest part of it and the one thing we can't figure out. Cities come back by bringing in a whole new set of people and pushing out those who can't make it."

The 24/7 report is timely as groups seek to solve poverty.

About 20 public officials are expected to gather Saturday in Lincoln Park for a meeting to discuss what steps can be taken to alleviate poverty in Wayne County. The meeting aims to develop an economic plan to help working-class families and people in poverty.

"There's not a magic bullet," said Lincoln Park City Councilman Chris Dardzinkski, who organized the invitation-only meeting at the Kennedy Senior Center with a speaker from the Center for Economic and Social Justice. "It's going to take time."

Also the University of Michigan now has an initiative, Poverty Solutions, to prevent and alleviate poverty. Among other projects, it has developed an online map to help policy makers and organizations understand poverty in their communities.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.