State poverty rate approaches 10%
Nearly 10% of Massachusetts residents are poor — more than previously thought — according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report that factors in the costs of housing, commuting and medical care.
“Massachusetts, and the Boston area in particular, is one of the highest costs of living in the country, and it’s become highly problematic for people of average or below average income to afford to live,” said Greg Sullivan, research director for the Pioneer Institute based in Boston.
The Census Bureau said Tuesday that 9.4% of the state’s residents lived in poverty between 2018 and 2020. Its traditional, “official” measurement put the rate at 8.2%.
The alternative “supplemental poverty measure” takes into account government stimulus money and the costs of housing, commuting and medical care. Massachusetts was one of 11 states in which an alternate measure of poverty was higher than the traditional poverty rate which measures income based on gross pretax cash earnings.
The other states with higher supplemental poverty measure rates are California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Virginia.
“The (supplemental poverty measure) extends the official poverty measure by taking into account many of the government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals that are not included in the official measure,” said Liana Fox, chief of the Census Bureau’s Poverty Statistics Branch. “Non-cash benefits such as housing and nutritional assistance are added to pre-tax cash income, and necessary expenses such as taxes, work and medical expenses are subtracted.”
Sullivan said “housing and medical costs, also food costs should be considered” when factoring poverty rates.
“There’s no getting around the fact that people need a place to live and need to have access to health care,” he said.
Tuesday’s Census report revealed the median household income in the U.S. dropped 2.9% to $67,521 in 2020, a decrease from the 2019 median of $69,560.
On Thursday, the U.S. Census will put out locallevel population and demographic data from the 2020 count of the nation’s population in an easier-to-use format. The data will be crucial as lawmakers in Massachusetts and around the country prepare to hammer out new congressional and legislative district boundaries.
The 2020 census counted 7,029,917 people living in Massachusetts, a 482,288person, or 7.4%, increase over the last decade that outpaced the 4.1% average in the Northeast and equaled the growth rate of the country as a whole, according to the initial publication of the data.