Californians have both above-average poverty levels and above-average median family incomes, according to a new Census Bureau report.
The bureau fixed California’s official poverty rate in 2014 at 16.4 percent, representing 6.25 million residents of the state and nearly a full percentage point higher than the national rate of 15.5 percent.
Fourteen states had rates higher than California’s, topped by Mississippi’s 21.9 percent, while New Hampshire was the lowest at 9.2 percent.
However, the official poverty rate calculated for the report used a half-century-old method that makes no allowance for regional differences in either incomes or living costs. The bureau has developed a “supplemental measure” that takes those and other factors into account and by that method, California’s poverty rate is the nation’s highest at 24.3 percent, largely due to its extraordinarily high housing costs.
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