America's 10 Poorest Cities

Volunteer Mary Martinez (R) gives people a monthly food handout distributed from the Imperial Valley Food Bank on March 13, 2009 in El Centro, California. El Centro is one of America's most impoverished cities.

(David McNew/Getty Images)

The Great Recession is rewriting the rules of American poverty. Data from the Census Bureau, released in September, show that during the first year of the recession, incomes fell farther and poverty leaped higher than during almost any other time in a generation.

In 2008, U.S. median income fell to $50,303 from $52,163 in 2007. That 3.6% decline is the largest one-year drop since records begin. The poverty rate increased to 13.2% from 12.5%, meaning the recession has brought 2.6 million more Americans into poverty. The Economic Policy Institute projects that in the next two years, incomes could decline by another $3,000 and poverty could increase by 1.9 percentage points.

Just as the recession has changed the map of unemployment (see "Stars and Jobless Stripes"), it has redrawn the contours of poverty.

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To find out who is being hit worst, we used new data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey. Although the Census Bureau defines poverty simply as people earning below a certain income level, (which varies based on family size) we also looked at per capita incomes for a region, the percentage of food stamp recipients, the percentage of people under age 65 receiving public health care and the unemployment rate.

Poverty may once have been worst in the Deep South. And cities on the border with Mexico are plagued with poverty. But the recession--and the decline of American manufacturing--has left Rust Belt cities with comparable levels of poverty. The problem is concentrated in these three regions. All 10 cities on our list are southern cities, border cities or declining manufacturing centers.