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Nine days ago, we highlighted the Census Bureau's most recent report on poverty levels in the US . But Catherine Rampall 's writing at the New York Times Economix blog steered us toward the Census's state-by-state data on poverty levels from 2008 to 2009, and there are some interesting highlights, (or rather, lowlights, as there aren't any states where we saw the poverty rate decline in a meaningful way from 2008 to 2009). Report authors Alemayehu Bishaw and Suzanne Macartney write: Poverty rates from the 2009 ACS for the 50 states and the District of Columbia ranged from a low of 8.5 percent in New Hampshire to a high of 21.9 percent in Mississippi. Only five states had estimated poverty rates lower than 10 percent— Alaska, Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. On the other side of the distribution five states had estimated poverty rates at or above 17 percent in 2009— Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Thirty-one states experienced increases in both the number and percentage of people in poverty between the 2008 ACS and the 2009 ACS. No state had a statistically significant decline in either the number in poverty or the poverty rate. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia saw no statistically significant differences in either the number of people in poverty or the poverty rate from the 2008 ACS to the 2009 ACS—Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Here's a look at the poverty rates by state in a map from the report: You can access the report here .

The last decade was a bad one for poverty in America, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution . After the economic growth of the 1990s brought "near record lows in the poverty rate and considerable declines in the number of high-poverty neighborhoods", the early 2000s saw those numbers shoot back up. And there is some data that shows that suburbs led that growth. Brookings researchers Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr write: In 2000, the greatest share of the poor lived in the primary cities of the country’s largest metro areas. These cities were home to almost 400,000 more poor than their suburbs, and the balance of the poor population was more likely to live in non-metropolitan communities than small metro areas. However, growth rates well above average in the suburban and small metro area poor populations have re-drawn the map over the course of the decade. Most notably, by 2008 a plurality of the nation’s poor lived in large metropolitan suburbs. Between 2000 and 2008, the number of these suburban poor increased by 25 percent—10 points above the national average and close to 5 times the growth rate for the poor in primary cities. Overall, suburbs gained more than 2.5 million poor individuals, accounting for almost half of the total increase in the nation’s poor population since 2000. Smaller metro areas saw their poor population increase almost 20 percent, a gain of 1.3 million poor over the eight-year period. At the same time, non-metro area and primary city poor populations also grew, but at much slower paces of 12.1 and 5.6 percent—or 842,000 and 582,000 people—respectively. As a result, by 2008 suburbs had overtaken primary cities as home to the largest share of the nation’s poor (almost one-third), and small metro areas housed more poor people than non-metro areas. Here's a look at the increase in the poverty rate in suburbs compared to other types of communities: And here's a look at the growth in the poverty rate for suburbs in the four major regions of the country: Read The Suburbanization of Poverty here .