A county just north Colum­bus, Ohio has 18 per­cent poverty accord­ing the US Cen­sus Bureau. The num­bers con­tinue to climb for Mar­ion County, who has suf­fered even more job losses since the US Cen­sus recorded this data from 2008.

From the Colum­bus Dis­patch writ­ers Cather­ine Can­disky and Alan John­son take a look at the num­bers and their dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences on Ohio. The news­pa­per also has graph­ics that show the con­cen­tra­tions of poverty in Ohio and throught the US.

Mar­ion County’s 2008 poverty rate of 19.4 per­cent rep­re­sents a jump of more than half in only two years for the county of 66,396 peo­ple about an hour north of Columbus.

New statewide fig­ures from the Cen­sus Bureau’s Amer­i­can Com­mu­nity Sur­vey show that 13.4 per­cent of Ohioans were liv­ing in poverty in 2008, up slightly from the pre­vi­ous year and just above the national aver­age of 13.2 percent.

Still, poverty holds a fierce grip on Ohio, par­tic­u­larly in the state’s urban centers.

Of America’s top 10 poor­est cities, three are in Ohio — Cleve­land, Cincin­nati and Toledo. No other state had more than one.

Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Ohio Asso­ci­a­tion of Sec­ond Har­vest Food­banks, said the poverty level is almost cer­tainly worse than the num­bers indi­cate because the sta­tis­tics are for 2008, and things have got­ten only worse this year.

“Ohioans are get­ting poorer every day,” she said. “We know, from our food pantries, it has got­ten worse day after day, week after week.”

Ohio is in “a race to the bot­tom,” Hamler-Fugitt said.
…

Accord­ing to the cen­sus report, 19.4 per­cent of Mar­ion County res­i­dents were liv­ing in poverty in 2008, up from 15.7 per­cent in 2007 and 11.9 per­cent in 2006. The poverty thresh­old is about $18,000 a year for a fam­ily of three and $22,000 for a fam­ily of four.

The sur­vey mea­sures coun­ties with at least 65,000 pop­u­la­tion, mean­ing vir­tu­ally all of Ohio’s Appalachian coun­ties are not included.

Poverty in Franklin County actu­ally dropped to 15 per­cent from 16.3 per­cent in both 2007 and 2006.

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