Tiny Rappahannock ranks near the top nationally — and it isn’t necessarily flattering

County assessment has surprising figures on income inequality, poverty and disability

Rappahannock County has one of the highest rates of income inequality in the United States, ranking an astonishing 64th among the entire 3,084 jurisdictions (counties and county equivalents) in the United States.

According to federal and state figures, Rappahannock households in the top 1 percent income bracket earn 33 times that of households in the bottom 1 percent — a persistent problem cited by lower-income residents across the country, as it drives up local costs.

Comparably speaking, neighboring Fauquier County is ranked 857th and Culpeper is 2,750th in income inequality.

At the same time, Rappahannock has the highest poverty rate — 10 percent — in Virginia’s northern Piedmont region, with an even higher poverty rate for children at more than 16 percent, which is above the state average of 15 percent.

The county also has a “larger than expected” linguistically isolated population: 2.4 percent of its overwhelmingly caucasian residents have limited English proficiency.

And an above average number of Rappahannock citizens have a disability — 12 percent of the population — the majority being women.

These are just a few of the findings contained in the “2017 Community Assessment” of Rappahannock County just released by People, Inc., a Virginia-based organization that seeks to provide opportunities to enhance lives, families and communities from here in the northern Piedmont to southwest Virginia’s coal country.

Statistics in the report are culled from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So detailed is the Rappahannock assessment in areas that include population, housing, education, poverty, and public assistance that it would arguably take sociologists weeks if not months to evaluate.

For example, the median household income of Rappahannock County is $59,753 — well below the state median of $65,015, but skewed given the extremely lopsided wealthy sector of the county’s population.

Rappahannock’s poverty figures reveal that the average amount of public assistance benefits received by county residents is $4,170 — well above the state average of $2,918, and the national average of $3,490.

Although the rate for socalled food insecurity is only 9 percent for the total population, it is over 19 percent for children in the county. In other words, 1 of 5 children in Rappahannock are in need of nutritional assistance, according to the report.

More concerning, according to the report, is the rate of children who are “food insecure” yet “ineligible” for assistance: 37 percent compared to a national average of 31 percent.

SNAP, a primary means of supporting “food insecure families”, is provided to 6 percent (about 192) of Rappahannock households.

“However, there is only one grocery store in the county that is authorized to accept SNAP benefits and no grocery stores authorized to accept WIC (federal Women, Infants, and Children Food and Nutrition Service) payments,” the report states.

“This means that low-income families must travel the long distance to neighboring counties for groceries, which can be difficult when you may not have a car or money for gas.”

Staying with the subject of Rappahannock children, the U.S. Department of Education reports that 35.5 percent of fourth graders in the county — more than 1 in 3 students — scored “not proficient or worse” on standardized reading tests in 2014-15, well above the state average of 23 percent. As for beyond fourth grade? “The county has a high rate of individuals with a high school education or less — more than 65 percent of all those 18 and older. More significant, however, is the gender differences. Among those with no high school diploma, 17 percent are male and 10 percent are female,” according to the report.

“For [Rappahannock] individuals in poverty, 42 percent of men have no high school diploma, compared to 22 percent of women.”

In other findings: the median age in the county is just under 50 years old (49.1), a

whopping decade-plus older than the state’s average age of 37.6. The largest portion of the population is over 65 (almost 23 percent), while only 18 percent of the county is under the age of 18.

Of most concern, says the report, is the small portion of young adults: those 18 to 24 account for only 5.8 percent of the population, and those 25 to 34 is only slightly larger at 7.9 percent.

“While Fauquier and Culpeper are well developed and growing more so, Rappahannock’s low-density development contains only 28 people per square mile and zoning laws limit development so strictly that population growth will be extremely limited,” says the report.

“From 2020 to 2040, growth is projected to be only 5.75 percent in Rappahannock. Meanwhile, in Culpeper, the population is expected to grow 32.8 percent, and in Fauquier growth is projected to be 25.52 percent.”

In fact, the report projects that by 2040 the number of young adults aged 20 to 24 in Rappahannock will actually “decline” due to a lack of jobs and housing opportunities. The largest segment of the population, adults 25 to 64, will remain “stagnant.”

Currently, among the 7,308 residents of Rappahannock County, 93 percent are white, 4 percent are African American, and 3 percent are Hispanic or Latino.

Some 13 percent of county residents are veterans, higher than the state average of 11 percent.

And if you think your neighbor renting the house next door was on the move, you’re probably correct: during a recent one year period more than 25 percent of renters in Rappahannock County moved — 20 percent to a different part of the state, 27 percent to another state.