Lots of people including Brewed Fresh Daily have noticed this story on the AP Newsflash (it will be in the PD tomorrow). It says ... wait for it... Cleveland isn't the poorest big U.S. city any more!
The story is about the new Census Bureau 2004 American Community Survey. (Incidentally, props to the AP for putting a live link to its source at the end of the article.) A year ago the Plain Dealer headlined the 2003 ACS finding that Cleveland ranked last in four income and poverty categories, turning "the poorest city" into Cleveland's Meme of the Year. I tried to explain at the time that the ACS statistics were, to put it politely, a little hinky. But hey, I said, if being last on a list gets some attention for poor people, where's the harm? More power to the hinky statistics.
Now a year has passed, the Great Wheel of the Census has turned, and the Meme must die. Well, actually, it just has to move to Detroit. Let's hope they treat it well.
Seriously, folks, do not take this stuff seriously. The ACS is a national poll -- not an actual census -- with big error margins for data as local as one city. As an example, I pointed out last year that the survey's population and household counts for 2000 through 2003 made little sense. Here are the same numbers for 2001 through 2004:
Yes, you're reading the chart right. The ACS says Cleveland's population living in households jumped by almost 10,000 between 2001 and 2002, then plummeted by nearly 50,000 in the following two years... even though there was almost no change in the number of households in the city.
If you think this could be true, well, okay, take the rest of the ACS seriously. But if you doubt that one out of every ten Clevelanders left town in the last two years, you probably should extend that skepticism to the ACS' assertions that:
Cleveland's overall poverty rate fell from 31% to 23% between 2003 and 2004, and... all of which are part of our purported leap from "poorest city" to "twelfth poorest city".
our percentage of children in poverty fell from 47% to 32%, and
our median household income rose nearly $5,000 in that same miraculous year...
Bottom line: We didn't learn anything new about poverty in Cleveland from last year's American Community Survey, and we won't learn anything new from this year's, either. This city -- like Newark, Miami, Detroit, and many others -- faces a deep-rooted crisis of underemployment, undereducation, and underearning. Who cares if that crisis is "worst" or "twelfth-worst" in the nation?
It's plenty bad enough either way.