Interested to know which are the poorest large major cities in America in 2018? Read along!
Being born out of the US and in the poor world region (the Balkans), it comes strange to me that there are actually poor cities in that part of the globe. While reading the news, there are always some big numbers involved which, from my perspective, are impossible to get to if you are not overall a rich country. Regardless of what I think, the US is shown to be a rich country with occasional poor cities here and there. Well, of course, it would be very unnatural that all of the cities within the 50 state are rich! Also, we should have in mind that there is a big difference when we talk about poverty in America and elsewhere. After all, living standards differ from one country to another one.
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You can read about the poorest cities in the US in 2017 in one of our previous articles – 25 Poorest Cities in America in 2017. Some of them are El Centro in California and Port St. Lucie in Florida, which are basically smaller size cities. That is why, with today’s list, we covered only poorest large cities in America for this year. What you will notice on your own, while reading, is that two cities of Texas are mentioned. That can provoke a thought that Texas is, in general, a poor state. For example, the average annual salary of an office manager is $43,686. We could say it is not much, but there are also poorer as well as the richer states than Texas. I think it is fair to say that it is somewhere in between, according to annual average salary. However, while researching this topic, questions like “why is Philadelphia so poor?” and “what are the causes of poverty in Philadelphia?” were bumping up almost on every corner. So, we decided to provide you with the answers.
Poverty in Philadelphia reached its peak in 2015, when 12.2% of the city’s population lived in deep poverty, with income under 50% of the federal poverty limit. According to the Pew Trust, “it is difficult to find a single statistical indicator that best captures the state of the city.” On the other hand, some suggested that poverty could be examined by age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Philly found three possible explanations of big poverty in Philadelphia which include transportation, housing and land use in suburbs. In order to see if the city progressed, we compared the poverty rate in the year 2016 and 2017, and we found out that it didn’t change much. So that you get a clearer impression, in 2016, the income for the family of four was $24,300 or even less.
In order to create our list of poorest large major cities in America in 2018, we first took as many suggestions as we could, from various sources such as already mentioned Philly, then CBS News, MLive, World Atlas, and many others. Then we checked for each suggested city its average annual salary on the PayScale, and in addition, ranked them in that manner. Even though during our research there were some indicators that Reading, PA could be one of the poorest cities, in the end, that wasn’t the case. The list goes from the richest to the poorest city in the USA. Now let’s get started!
16. Boston, Massachusetts
Annual median income: $70,800
The cost of living in Boston is 46.8 percent higher than the national average, according to the PayScale. Moreover, some of the most popular occupations are Operations Manager, Software Engineer, and Senior Software Engineer. The salary for those positions is between $70,666 and $112,483 annually. In contrary, the lowest paid position on the same list is the Financial Analyst with pay of $59,573.
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