For many in poverty areas, rent took a real bite out of income. Nearly half the Nation's poverty area population lived in the South. They usually have between 2,500 and 8,000 residents and do not cross county boundaries. All metropolitan counties are subdivided into census tracts. In many nonmetropolitan counties, however, local census committees have not established census tracts.
Special file provides more extensive information on poverty areas.
The data in this Brief come from Poverty Areas in the United States, a CD-ROM recently released by the Census Bureau. To illustrate how this CD can be used to analyze poverty areas of individual cities, let's take a look at the District of Columbia. The map below shows which of the city's census tracts were poverty areas in 1989 and which were extreme poverty areas. More than 88 percent of the residents in DC poverty areas were Black. Another 8 percent were White, while the remaining 4 percent were persons of other races.