Presentation description

The United States (US) measures poverty based on how an individual's or faimy's income compares to a set federal threshold. Persistent poverty areas (with a poverty rate of ≥20% spanning 30 years) in the (US) have been described in metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan areas, but have yet to be described in frontier areas.

Purpose: To evaluate whether frontier areas US have a higher proportion of residents living in census tracts with persistent poverty compared to non-frontier areas across the metropolitan-to-frontier continuum.

Methods: Census tract-level persistent poverty was obtained from the US Department of Agriculture's Poverty Area Measure and linked to population and socioeconomic estimates from the 2019 American Community Survey 5-year data. Tracts were categorized as metropolitan, micropolitan, small town/rural, frontier-micropolitan, and frontier-small town/rural using the Integrated Metropolitan-to-Frontier Area Codes (IMFAC). We report descriptive statistics for persistent poverty and other socioeconomic factors across IMFAC for the overall US and the Huntsman Cancer Institute's five‑state Area We Serve (ID, MT, NV, UT, WY).

Results: Of 68,600 tracts with available data (48 excluded due to missing data), 9.7% of the US population and 4.7% of the Area We Served lived in persistent poverty. In the overall US, the highest proportion of residents living in persistent poverty was in frontier-small town/rural areas (16%), followed by frontier-micropolitan (14%), micropolitan (12%), small town/rural (10%), and metropolitan (9.2%). In the Area We Serve, the highest proportion of residents living in persistent poverty was in micropolitan census tracts (8.3%), then frontier-small town/rural (5.6%), small town/rural (5.4%), metropolitan (4.3%), and frontier-micropolitan (3.8%).

Conclusion: The highest proportion of residents living in persistent poverty tracts were in frontier areas for the US, but were in micropolitan areas for the Area We Serve. This highlights regional variations in persistent poverty across the metropolitan-to-frontier continuum