Its plague of crime, violence, alcoholism, drug trafficking, and broken families is clearly poverty-related. Police have been multiplied, substandard housing condemned, and neighborhoods gentrified. But the clean-up has been a mixed blessing. As the middle class moves in, rents skyrocket. Now low-income workers can't afford to live anywhere in the area.
Poverty can be absolute or relative.
WHO calls poverty the World's biggest killer. As in the rest of the world, the income gap in the US keeps growing. High-paid industrial managers now earn 150 times as much as the average worker, up from 70 times as much 10 years ago. Real wages of low-paid workers have decreased, as has job security. It has the widest income gap in the North.