Your blogger’s home state of Michi­gan has seen many jobs go to Indi­ana instead of com­ing here. Indi­ana seems to do a good job of attract­ing busi­ness down there thanks to favor­able tax breaks.

But Indi­ana’ prox­im­ity to Detroit means it was reliant on the auto indus­try as well. The effects of the car bankruptcy’s has hit Indi­ana hard accord­ing to the US Cen­sus Bureau.

In another of our series of the Com­mu­nity Sur­veys, Indi­anapo­lis Star Press gives us the results for Indiana.

The per­cent­age of Hoosiers liv­ing in poverty increased to 13.1 per­cent in 2008, up from 12.3 per­cent the year before, accord­ing to the Cen­sus Bureau’s annual Amer­i­can Com­mu­nity Survey.

That sur­vey esti­mates that more than 807,000 Hoosiers were liv­ing in poverty in 2008, up from 757,000 in 2007.

The num­bers are par­tic­u­larly dis­turb­ing for black and His­panic Hoosiers. In 2007, 25.5 per­cent of blacks and 22.2 per­cent of His­pan­ics lived below the poverty line, com­pared with 10.4 per­cent of whites. But this year’s sur­vey shows those num­bers have climbed to 28.1 per­cent of blacks and 23.7 per­cent of His­pan­ics. The per­cent­age of whites rose more slowly, to 11 percent.

Experts who work with the home­less and help dis­trib­ute food stamps say Indiana’s increased poverty rates reflect what they’ve seen since last year: More Hoosiers are strug­gling to make ends meet and feed their families.

“These num­bers are directly related to what we’ve been see­ing, that’s for sure,” said Rich Adams, deputy direc­tor of the state’s Divi­sion of Fam­ily Resources, which dis­trib­utes food stamps. “We’ve seen a steady increase in the num­ber of peo­ple need­ing food stamps for the last sev­eral years.”

The cen­sus sur­vey found that Cal­i­for­nia, Florida, Ore­gon, Penn­syl­va­nia, Michi­gan, Hawaii and Con­necti­cut also had sig­nif­i­cant sta­tis­ti­cal increases in their poverty rates.

Like

Unlike