The share of people unable to make ends meet last year – as measured by the US Census Bureau’s offi cial poverty line, which is about $19,000 in annual income for a family of three – remained well above the pre-recession low. Nearly 1 in 6 Californians (16.4 percent) lived in poverty in 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, down slightly from a high of 17.0 percent in 2012, but still a full 4.0 percentage points higher than in 2007.1 Poverty remained widespread even though the state’s unemployment rate declined from a high of 12.2 percent in 2010 to 7.5 percent in 2014.
Clearly the economic recovery is not reaching everyone, a fact that is even more evident when looking at differences among California counties
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