Everywhere I turn the rich are getting richer and high paying jobs are MIA in this recovery.
Louisville income, poverty both rise
Fewer also have health insurance
By Marcus Green
magreen@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
Louisville's haves and have-nots are headed in opposite directions.
The city's income levels and poverty rate both climbed last year, sending mixed signals about Louisville's economic health, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates released yesterday.
The median household income rose to $43,355, although the city's economy is growing at a slower pace than the state and the nation.
At the same time the population is expanding, a growing share of Louisville residents lived in poor conditions in 2006, contributing to Kentucky's rank as one of the 10 most impoverished states.
"We still rank near the bottom on all these measures of poverty," said Ron Crouch, director of the Kentucky State Data Center at the University of Louisville.
In addition to rising poverty, the number of Kentuckians without health insurance increased last year, though it remained below the national average, according to census estimates.
In the past three years, an average of 13.8 percent of state residents -- or 564,000 people -- lacked private or government coverage, based on surveys of a sample of the population. That compared with about 13 percent in the previous three-year period, from 2002 to 2005. The national average was 15.8 percent.
The Census Bureau reports state health-insurance figures over a three-year period because the relatively small sample size, with its resulting margin of error, can cause large swings from year to year that can be misleading.
The growing number of people without health insurance could be caused by the type of jobs the economy is creating, Crouch said.
Higher-paying jobs in manufacturing and other areas are being replaced by retail and service jobs that historically are less likely to include health insurance, he said.
That trend may also be a factor in the city's rising poverty rate, said Cathy Hinko, executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, a nonprofit agency that supports fair housing issues. Louisville's poverty rate exceeds the national rate of 13.3 percent, as does Kentucky's.
Six of the 10 occupations projected to add the most jobs in the Louisville region between 2004 and 2014 have a median salary below $25,000, according to KentuckianaWorks, the work-force development agency for metro government.
Those jobs "do not pay wages that support renting a two-bedroom unit without being a burden to a household," Hinko said. Housing is considered affordable if it takes up no more 30 percent of a household's income.
Mayor Jerry Abramson's office was discouraged by the climb in the city's poverty rate and will investigate the data to seek its cause, said Chris Poynter, an Abramson spokesman. Fifteen percent of residents lived in poverty last year, up from 13.4 percent the year before.
But Poynter said it's encouraging that the median household income jumped by more than $2,500 in one year. He noted the recent creation of PharMerica Corp., which sells medications to nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities, and the $1 billion UPS expansion as positive developments.
A flurry of downtown projects -- totaling $2 billion in investment -- will create thousands of construction jobs in the next five years, Poynter said.
"We hope to be able to bring that poverty rate down because the bottom line is we have to have good jobs to decrease the poverty rate," Poynter said. "We in Louisville are lucky that our economy is growing."
But Louisville households aren't getting as much for their earnings as they were in 1999, the year the last Census measured. The median household income in 1999 was $39,457, which would have a buying power of $47,745 in 2006.
The estimates are part of an annual Census Bureau survey that samples a small portion of the United States. About 7,500 households in Louisville were included in last year's survey, for example.
Outlying areas fare better
Louisville's increase in its median household income between 1999 and 2006 trailed outlying counties such as Bullitt County and Floyd County, Ind., both of which posted gains higher than the national average.
It's a trend that doesn't surprise Crouch. He said urban counties typically have larger minority populations, and those groups historically have trailed whites in income increases.
Louisville's population growth is being driven by minorities, according to data from the Kentucky State Data Center.
The city grew by 1.1 percent from 2000 to 2006, to 701,500 people. The Hispanic population jumped by 48 percent, to 18,352 residents, and the African American population climbed by 7 percent, to 141,649. The white population declined by 1.2 percent, to 535,703.
The poverty rates for the city's black and Hispanic populations are far higher than for Louisville's white residents. More than one-third of black and Hispanic residents live in poverty, compared with less than 10 percent of white residents.
"Some of those pathways into the middle class for minorities have not been as positive as they were 10, 20, 30 years ago, when we had a large number of manufacturing jobs," Crouch said.
Floyd County, Ind., showed the sharpest gain in median household income among the counties included in the Census survey, which measured areas with populations greater than 65,000. Since 1999, income levels there have jumped more than 16 percent to $51,213.
Michael Dalby, president of One Southern Indiana, an economic development group representing Clark and Floyd counties, said the increase may be a result of families moving to outlying parts of Floyd County.
"I think a lot of that is the quality of the housing stock and the school district. The schools in the district are well known," Dalby said.
Floyd and Bullitt County were the only two counties in the Louisville metro area whose median household incomes were greater than the national average, $48.201.
Bullitt has added about 3,000 jobs in the past four years, with an investment of at least $260 million, said Bob Fouts, who heads the county's economic development authority.
Fouts said the growth in jobs -- about half of which are filled by Bullitt County residents -- is due in part to distribution companies moving to business parks not far from Interstate 65 and within a short drive of Louisville International Airport.
"It's the ease of getting on the interstate," he said. "Our business parks are about a mile or less from the interstate."
Reporter Marcus Green can be reached at (502) 582-4675. Reporter Patrick Howington contributed to this story.
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