Elsewhere in this report showed the income distributions for racial and ethnic groups across age groups. We found that most poor people are white, but that a larger share of black and Hispanic people have low incomes. We find the same pattern when we look at poverty. Poverty is, after all, a different way of describing income. The numbers aren’t exactly the same in the poverty count as in the low-income count. Two households could have the same low income but one would be in poverty and the other not. An income of $15,000 a year, for instance, would mean poverty for a family of three, but not for a single person.

Source: American Community Survey

Poverty affects black and white residents of Indianapolis in similar numbers. According to data from the American Community Survey, 64,849 white people and 55,623 black people were in poverty in 2006. (A person is included in the count if he or she experienced poverty for even a short period during the year).

In addition to parsing the incidence of poverty by race, this chart also does so by age. In doing so, it illustrates one reason why solving poverty has challenged American society for decades. The number of poverty-stricken people who are in the working-age cohorts, and therefore eligible for training and other assistance that would enable them to move out of poverty, is nearly the same as the number who are either too young or too old to work, and therefore in need of assistance to alleviate suffering. But few, if any, anti-poverty programs simultaneously allocate resources for both purposes. Of course, many households have both kinds of people in them. But the fact that the two kinds of poor people exist in equal numbers makes the choice of either strategy difficult to make.