Pockets of poverty deepen in Atlanta and state

Pockets of poverty in some of the nation’s biggest metropolitan areas grew more concentrated between 1999 and 2005, with some of the largest increases in the numbers of working poor sharing the same neighborhoods occurring in Georgia, according to a new report.

More families earning under $39,000 a year are clustering in the same residential areas in regions including Atlanta and Augusta, forming low-income enclaves where experts say they’re cut off from resources to help ease them out of poverty.

The report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution found 29.3 percent of those deemed working poor — defined as recipients of a special federal tax credit for low-income workers — in the Augusta-Richmond County region lived in communities where more than 40 percent of their neighbors also received the credit in 2005.

That’s up 14.8 percentage points from 1999, and surpasses rates in metropolitan Detroit, Miami and Philadelphia, according to “Reversal of Fortune: A New Look at Concentrated Poverty in the 2000s.”

The study also found rates of concentrated poverty in the Atlanta metropolitan region increased 2.6 percentage points between 1999 and 2005, with roughly 10.6 percent of working poor living in high-poverty communities in 2005.

Nationally, about 12.3 percent of low-income working families lived in concentrated poverty that year, according to the report, which uses Internal Revenue Service data on the number of households receiving the federal Earned Income Tax Credit in 58 metropolitan areas to map where communities of working poor are growing.

The tax credit is available to people earning roughly $39,000 or less annually.

Factors pushing low-income families into poor districts range from lack of affordable housing in metropolitan regions to struggling local economies, said Elizabeth Kneebone, the report’s co-author.

Cut off from better schools and job opportunities, many working poor families will remain impoverished, Kneebone said in a telephone interview.

The trend has been especially acute in areas that suffered manufacturing job losses over the first half of the decade.

“These are places in the Northeast and the Midwest, and some parts of the South, that led the list,” she said.

Augusta city officials have spent nearly three years creating more than 3,000 jobs, and have committed some $37 million to redeveloping inner city neighborhoods, said Mayor Deke Copenhaver.

“The report is based on data from 2005, so I question a little bit about the validity of it as it applies to what’s going on in Augusta today,” he said Wednesday.

As a whole, the South is seeing less concentrated poverty.

While the overall number of metro area tax filers receiving the EITC increased in the South, the share of them segregated in poor communities only inched forward.

“In 2005, about 13 percent of low-income workers in the South lived in very poor working areas, and that’s an increase of 2.8 percentage points over 1999,” Kneebone said.

Pockets of concentrated poverty grew by 5 and 3.7 percentage points in the Northeast and Midwest respectively during that time. They decreased by 6.2 percentage points in the West.

Regions in North Carolina and Tennessee saw particular improvement, with decreases in concentrated poverty in the Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville and Knoxville metro regions.

Kneebone said that may reflect more widely available affordable housing, enabling poor families to branch into mixed-income neighborhoods.

In Charlotte “they saw an increase overall in the number of working poor in the communities in their region,” she said. “But that increase was shared across the metropolitan region.”