New figures released by the Census Bureau yesterday showed that poverty remains high in the District and has grown significantly since the onset of the recession in some areas of the city. In 2012, just over 18 percent of DC residents’108,732 people’lived below the poverty line, which is less than $23,492 for a family of four. This was slightly lower than the 18.7 percent rate reported in last year’s survey and was not found to be a statistically significant difference due to a large margin of error and small sample size. Data showed the median income in DC for 2012 was $66,583.
Here are some other findings from the survey:
Poverty rates remained high for some groups of residents
- Approximately one-in-four DC children lived below the poverty line in 2012. This number was smaller, but not statistically different from the child poverty rate of 30.2 percent in 2011. It will be worth keeping an eye on these figures next year to see if this is the start of the downward trend in child poverty in DC or an anomaly with the data.
- Poverty also remained high for residents with a high school diploma or less. In fact, more than one-in-three residents without a college degree lived below the poverty line in 2012 and just over 22 percent of residents with a high school diploma lived in poverty. These rates were far high than for those residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher, whose poverty rate was 5 percent in 2012.
- Approximately one-in-four Black residents and 22 percent of Hispanic or Latino residents lived below poverty in 2012. The poverty rate was 12 percent for Asian residents and 7 percent for White, non-Hispanic residents.
Poverty Rates Have Jumped Significantly In Some Areas Since 2007
The Census breaks down the District into five areas that roughly correspond to some ward boundaries, but do have significant overlap among wards (See 
Neighborhood Info DC[1] for a map that compares the Ward and public use microdata areas (PUMA) boundaries). The highest poverty rates continue to be in Wards 7 and 8, where one-in-three residents lived below the poverty line in 2012 (see figure 1). This is substantially higher than the poverty rate of 27 percent in 2007. Poverty rates also jumped in areas covering Ward 5 and 6, which saw poverty rise by more than one-third. The rate also jumped in parts ofWards 1, 4, and 5; some parts of Wards 1 and 5 saw poverty rise by more than two-thirds.
The area of DC that includes the downtown core and parts of wards 1, 5 and 6 saw a significant decline in poverty from 2007, falling from 22 percent to 12 percent over the last five years. This is likely due to the significant influx of higher-income residents into the more recently developed areas like the Southwest Waterfront. In fact, this was the only area of DC to also see a statistically significant rise in income from 2007 to 2012, with median incomes rising from $64,645 to $82,594.
