Saturday, February 04, 2006

Ed Sellers' Outrageous Statement About Poverty in SC

All of us from South Carolina know where people in poverty live, don't we? They live down there in places like Allendale, Hampton, and Jasper counties, in the lower part of the Lowcountry. If we're going to solve the problems of poverty in South Carolina, we have to start there, don't we?

At the Greenville Chamber's annual meeting in January, Ed Sellers, Chairman of New Carolina (SC's Council on Competitiveness) made an outrageous statement. Ed said that Greenville, Richland, and Charleston counties each had more people in poverty than the eight rural counties in the lower part of the Lowcountry combined. No one that knows Ed really doubts that he has the data to back an outrageous statement like that up. (Ed has more data at his fingertips that the next ten people in this state combined).

Ed's point is not that we ignore poverty in rural counties, but that we also have to solve poverty in the metropolitan areas of the state, which is where the most people in poverty live. Poverty is not just a problem over there somewhere.

Don't believe Ed? Here's the outrageous truth in the latest data from the US census bureau.





Greenville
Charleston
Richland
Total

Hampton
Jasper
Colleton
Allendale
Barnwell
Clarendon
Calhoun
Bamberg
Total
Population
401,174
326,762
334,609


21,301
21,193
39,595
11,061
23,404
33,157
15,287
15,952
% in poverty
10.50%
16.40%
13.70%


20.70%
21.80%
21.10%
34.50%
20.90%
23.10%
16.20%
27.80%
# in poverty
42,123
53,589
45,841
141,554

4,644
4,387
8,355
3,816
4,891
7,659
2,476
4,435
40,663

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Perhaps the Department of Commerce should be reading these statistics when they try to locate business to the rural areas rather than the urban areas. Or when they give stronger incentives to the less developed counties than the developed counties.