UPDATE: High-poverty ZIP codes and COVID social needs in 31 states

Last Sunday’s report, “High-poverty ZIP codes hurting most for food, rent during COVID-19,” was so popular that we recreated it including all 31 states for which 2-1-1 data are available. This is up from the original seven states, and we’ve also added four more days of data, through yesterday. In all, we analyzed over 150,000 requests for food, rent and mortgage assistance received by 2-1-1s in the last month, March 12 – April 13, and examined how they were distributed by ZIP code. High-poverty ZIP codes were those with ≥ 25% of residents living in poverty, mid-poverty ZIP codes had 5 to <25% in poverty, and low-poverty ZIP codes had <5% in poverty. People living in high-poverty ZIP codes made up less than 10% of the population, but accounted for 31% of all requests for food pantries and over 19% of requests for rent or mortgage assistance. However, compared to the average number of daily requests in 2020 up to the COVID pandemic being declared on March 11, it was low-poverty ZIP codes experiencing the largest percentage increases in requests for food, rent and mortgage assistance. Mouse over each color of food and rent/mortgage icons to see the percentage increase. Statewide data for these analyses came from AL, AR, CT, DE, FL, HI, IA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, NC, NE, NJ, NV, NY, PA, SC, SD, VA, WI, WY; Selected counties were also included from CA, IL, IN, KS, KY, OH, TN. Data sources: 211 Counts, U.S. Census Bureau 2014-2018 American Community Survey 5-year Estimates.

 

Contributors:  Rachel Garg, Balaji Golla, Irum Javed, Matthew Kreuter, Jennifer Wolff