As noted in the last post, the racial disparities between blacks and whites in Rochester, NY are part of a larger pattern found throughout the greater Rust Belt. The Great Lakes region, stretching from Minnesota to through Upstate New York, has much higher levels of African-American poverty than the country as a whole, and a higher black-to-white poverty ratio than most parts of the country.
But what about the disparity between whites and Hispanics? How does the Rochester region compare to the rest of the country?
Not well.
Unlike African-American poverty, which is consistently highest in the economically stagnant rural South and the post-industrial Midwest, patterns in Hispanic poverty seem harder to characterize. Poverty among Hispanics is higher in the inland South, but without the same rural-urban divide that characterizes poverty among Southern blacks. While the Eastern seaboard broadly has lower levels of Hispanic poverty than the nation as a whole, much of New England, along with Philadelphia, has above average Hispanic poverty rates.
Notably, Upstate New York has higher rates of Hispanic poverty than most of the rest of the Rust Belt. Central and Western New York’s poverty rate among Hispanics is similar to the figures found in parts of North Carolina, Inland California, and the border region of Texas. While places such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis have above average black poverty rates, they also have below average Hispanic poverty rates.
Given that Upstate New York, unlike most regions in the country, has both high black and high Hispanic poverty rates, it should not be a surprise that Upstate communities have some of the highest combined African-American and Hispanic poverty in the country. The Rochester region has the 18th highest combined black and Hispanic poverty rate among MSAs with at least 10,000 black and 10,000 Hispanic Residents.
But many of those regions are much smaller than Rochester. Among those MSAs with at least 10,000 black residents, 10,000 Hispanic residents and at least a million overall inhabitants, the Rochester region has the second highest combined black and Hispanic Poverty rate. The scatterplot below show the relationship between minority and white poverty rates among the 51 MSAs that have at least 1 million residents in the United States.
A relationship exists between minority and white poverty in the nation’s largest communities. Diverse regions with lower white poverty rates tend to also have lower minority poverty rates, although the ratio between the two is still unacceptably high. Northern regions like Rochester, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Cincinnati stand out as having particularly high minority poverty rates relative to their white poverty levels. All of the largest MSAs with minority poverty rates above 30% are located in the Midwest or Northeast, and none have Non-Hispanic white rates above 11%. The Rochester and Buffalo regions are the only ones with combined black and Hispanic poverty rates above 35%.
ACT Rochester‘s latest report compares the Rochester region to New York State and the United States, and finds that on the topic of race and ethnicity, Rochester fares worse than those comparison geographies on nearly every measure. But the larger story, at least when it comes to poverty, is that the Rochester region’s disparities are part of a broader pattern found throughout the post-industrial Northeast and Midwest. Northern cities (with the exception of the thriving cities like Boston, New York City, and Washington DC) have both higher rates of poverty among minorities and greater disparities in poverty between whites and minorities. This pattern does not track neatly with state lines, but instead spans the region surrounding the Great Lakes and into New England. Communities like Rochester should look to other parts of the country to identify policies that lower racial disparities in poverty.
[…] Click here for Part 2. […]