Poverty Up in Anoka County, New Census Data Says

Signs of tough times are evident in Anoka County in new data released Thursday from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2011.

The percentage of Anoka County families and people whose income was below the poverty level in 2011 was 6.4 percent. That was up from 4.9 percent in the same survey in 2010.

Increases in poverty levels were most striking in families with children.

Families with Children
For all families in Anoka County with related children younger than 18, the poverty rate was 9.7 percent, up from 8.0 percent the year before.

For families whose related children were all younger than 5 years old, the poverty rate was 10.8 percent, up from 7.8 percent in 2011.

Married parents living at home were in much better economic shape, with only 2.3 percent below the povery line.

Single Mothers
Worst-off were Anoka County households headed by a female with no husband present. Nearly a quarter (24.6 percent) were poor in 2011, compared with 16.3 percent in 2010.

Among those, households with children younger than 18 were below the poverty at a rate of 31.7 percent (up from 16.3 percent in 2010).

And poverty was a fact of life for nearly half of Anoka County's female-headed households with related children who were all younger than 5 years old. The figure for 2011 was 48.3 percent, up from 29.8 percent in 2010. As recently as 2008, the rate for this group of households in Anoka County was 16.9 percent.

Statewide Figures
Those figures bring Anoka County into line with statewide poverty data in the ACS. 

Female-headed households with no husband present are in poverty at a rate of 27.8 percent across Minnesota. Those with children are at 35.4 percent, and those with children all under 5 are at 49.3 percent. The statewide figures have risen only slighly in the past five years, while Anoka County's have increased sharply.

Statewide, poverty for all households was at a lower rate (7.6 percent) in 2011 than in Anoka County. For families with children the statewide poverty rate was 12.7 percent.

To see more economic characteristics of Anoka County in the new 2011 American Community Survey, click on the PDF thumbnail.

For more data from the 2011 ACS, visit the American Community Survey main page. Click on Topics at left, then Datasets and 2011 ACS. Then click on Geographies at left, then County, Minnesota and Anoka.