If anyone’s interested in learning more about poverty in Richmond and in Virginia as a whole, then this report from Virginia’s Poverty Reduction Taskforce contains a lot of valuable information.
If you’re too busy/lazy to read the whole thing, then here is the Cliffs Notes version:
Stats:
- More than 10% of Virginians live below the poverty level. That’s more than one in ten.
- That’s more than 750,000 Virginians, 250,000 of whom are children.
- In 2008, 13.8% of children lived in households that were below the poverty line. That’s about one in seven children.
- Government assistance reduces the number of children in extreme poverty (that is, those with income less than half of the poverty threshold) by 76 percent.
- The state unemployment rate in June 2009 was 7.3%.
- The “typical” or modal Virginian below the poverty line is a white female head of household, age 25 to 34, with less than a high school education, with children, who works. The fact that more Virginians in poverty are white than nonwhite and more are working than not working contradicts a common image of poverty.
- Nearly 80% of people below the poverty line live in urban or suburban areas.
- Over the last 40 years the inflation-adjusted earnings of less-skilled workers have not increased, so for this group there has been no rising tide to lift them above poverty.
Solutions:
- Adults with high school completion credentials are more than 50 percent less likely to live in poverty.
- Increasing educational attainment netted up to a 15 percent reduction in poverty – a reduction of approximately 100,000 persons in Virginia.
- Approximately 500,000 households participating in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program and benefited from nearly $1 billion in tax credits, or nearly $2,000 per participating household.
- The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), as a cash refund to working families, lifts more than 25 percent of children out of poverty.
- Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) are matched savings ($2 of Virginia’s Individual Development Account Program (VIDA) funds to $1 of individual funds, up to $4,000 in VIDA funds) accounts that enable low-income families to save, build assets, and enter the financial mainstream.
- The Commonwealth has one of the most restrictive unemployment insurance programs in the nation. Only
26 percent of unemployed persons qualify, ranking Virginia 46th nationally.
- Click here to read the full Virginia Poverty Reduction Taskforce report.
