The number of extremely poor neighborhoods in Chattanooga and the region — those with poverty rates above 40 percent — more than doubled from 2000 to 2009, a new report shows.
The number of people living in the poorest census tracts in the Chattanooga region grew by more than 4,200, to 10,535, in the period, according to “The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty,” from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.
The Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institute is a liberal-leaning nonprofit that researches social issues.
“We lost ground against concentrated poverty in the 2000s,” Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research associate at Brookings and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “More people are living in areas that are extremely poor, and concentrated poverty now affects a greater swath of communities than in the past.”
In the release, Kneebone noted that the federal poverty level in 2010 was $22,314 annually for a family of four.