ACT Rochester and the Rochester Area Community Foundation have updated their three-year-old report on poverty in Rochester, and they find it’s getting worse.
The report looks at the entire nine-county Rochester region, the state of poverty and self-sufficiency and efforts to address the problems.
It finds the regional poverty rate based on government statistics to be just over 14 percent…up from just over 13 percent in the first report. The entire region now has more than 167,000 people living at less than the federal poverty level. However, seniors are doing better. Their poverty rate dropped from 7.8 to 7.1 percent.
For the entire region, just over 10 percent of families live in poverty. For families headed by a single woman, it’s 42 percent.
The City of Rochester continues to have the most extreme rate of poverty, with one third of all its citizens living below the poverty level. That’s nearly 34 percent, up from 31 percent in the first report. An updated analysis finds Rochester has the nation’s third highest concentration of poor people living in extremely poor census tracts. That’s unchanged over three years. What has changed is that 10 more city neighborhoods rate as extremely poor: from 27 up to 37.