Debates surrounding War on Poverty's anniversary can obscure a big fact: poverty is mainly rural

Welch, seat of McDowell County (NYT photo by Travis Dove)

The War on Poverty was started 50 years ago to help all poor Americans, but the anniversary "is being observed with academic conferences and ideological sparring — often focused, explicitly or implicitly, on the 'culture' of poor urban residents," Trip Gabriel reports for The New York Times. "Almost forgotten is how many ways poverty plays out in America, and how much long-term poverty is a rural problem."

Gabriel notes, "Of the 353 most persistently poor counties in the United States — defined by Washington as having had a poverty rate above 20 percent in each of the past three decades — 85 percent are rural. They are clustered in distinct regions: Indian reservations in the West; Hispanic communities in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; a band across the Deep South and along the Mississippi Delta with a majority black population; and Appalachia, largely white, which has supplied some of America’s iconic imagery of rural poverty since the Depression-era photos of Walker Evans."

The imagery remains stark in McDowell County, West Virginia, where not much has changed because the coal industry that once provided good jobs for some households has shriveled. Gabriel uses it as his object example, noting that McDowell leads the nation in lowest life expectancy for men, at 63.9 years of age, and is second worst in women, at 72.5. In 2012 the county was chosen as the the site of an experimental five-year project called Reconnecting McDowell to address issues like poverty, technology and transportation that limit educational opportunities in the county. The county was also the site of an award-winning, interactive documentary called  "Hollow".

"McDowell County is in some ways a place truly left behind, from which the educated few have fled, leaving almost no shreds of prosperity," Gabriel writes. "But in a nation with more than 46 million people living below the poverty line — 15 percent of the population — it is also a sobering reminder of how much remains broken, in drearily familiar ways and utterly unexpected ones, 50 years on." (Read more)