Thirty Years Of Low Child And Senior Poverty In NH

David Goehring / Flickr

While more counties have seen child poverty rise over the past 30 years, New Hampshire has stayed relatively steady.

We’re all about cool maps at StateImpact, and we just couldn’t resist sharing this one on the changing face of child and senior poverty over the past 30 years.  Demographer Kenneth Johnson at the Carsey Institute recently crunched some 2010 Census data, and working with a team at USA Today, came up with a cool county-by-county visualization.  (We can’t embed the map here, because it’s proprietary, but we promise you, it’s well worth the visit.)  By dragging a bar across the map, you can see which areas had child and/or senior poverty rates above 20 percent in 1980 and 2010.

The map clearly illustrates three stories about youth and elder poverty over the past 30 years:

1. The number of counties with senior poverty rates over 20 percent has gone down significantly.
2. The number of counties with child poverty rates over 20 percent has gone up significantly.
3. New Hampshire’s socio-economic landscape has remained relatively consistent over the past three decades, at least in terms of the oldest and youngest people.  No county in the 1980 or 2010 Census registered poverty rates among the young or old over 20 percent.