GUY RAZ, HOST: Fro him m NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: And I'm Robert Siegel.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: The U.S. poverty rate was 15 percent last year, that's the highest in almost two decades. Now, a new study finds that the nation's poorer are increasingly concentrated in extremely poor neighborhoods.</s>ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: As NPR's Pam Fessler reports, that presents additional challenges for anyone trying to pull themselves out of poverty.</s>PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: It's bad enough to be poor, but if most of your neighbors are poor, too, that can make life especially difficult.</s>ELIZABETH KNEEBONE: These kinds of neighborhoods tend to have poorer performing schools, higher crime rates; they are often fewer job networks and job opportunities within the neighborhood.</s>PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Elizabeth Kneebone is a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.</s>ELIZABETH KNEEBONE: So, not only are they struggling with their own poverty, people who live in these areas also have to struggle with all of the challenges of the poverty around them.</s>PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Which is a problem, because Kneebone and her colleagues have found that since 2000, a growing share of the poor live in extremely poor neighborhoods, where more than 40 percent of the residents fall below the official poverty line. The biggest growth in concentrated poverty has been in the suburbs; also in the South and the Midwest, where the recession has been especially devastating.</s>PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: One way to reverse the trend, say researchers, is to connect low-income residents to jobs and schools outside their neighborhoods, with things such as public transportation and affordable housing.</s>PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Pam Fessler, NPR News, Washington.
The U.S. poverty rate was 15 percent last year — the highest in almost two decades. New numbers out Thursday from the Brookings Institution show that the nation's poor are increasingly concentrated in extremely poor neighborhoods. This creates additional problems for those trying to work their way out of poverty.