National poverty rate fails to Capture the problem of poverty concentration in Georgia and beyond

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Sep 9, 2025

National poverty rate fails to Capture the problem of poverty concentration in Georgia and beyond

PEACHTREE CORNERS, GA—The official poverty rate fell 0.4% to 10.6% in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest report on poverty. The data shows that 35.9 million Americans were living in poverty last year.

These numbers suggest trends at a high level, but they don’t reflect the biggest poverty-related issue, both for the nation and for Georgia: the concentration of poverty in specific neighborhoods. Instead of affecting only certain individuals and families, poverty is enveloping entire communities. This is leading to significant geographic and societal separations among Georgians—not only financially, but also in terms of opportunities for education, work, and family formation.

Randy Hicks, the Georgia Center for Opportunity’s President and CEO, also shared that:

“The national numbers don’t tell us much about poverty from the perspective of the person or community experiencing it. They fail to convey that poverty is much more than a material issue for those who are struggling. Research has shown that people living in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty lack the essential local network of supportive relationships that’s crucial for helping them thrive and rise out of poverty.”

At a glance: facts on concentrated poverty in Georgia

Georgia’s poverty rate: 13.5%—2.9% above the national average, ranking 38th.
Poverty exceeds the national rate in 133 of Georgia’s 159 counties.
Atlanta’s poverty rate: 18.1% overall; 27.2% among children.
Lawrenceville’s poverty rate: 17.2%, compared with Gwinnett County’s 10.5%.
Southern and central Georgia show especially high concentrations of poverty.

Breaking down Georgia’s poverty landscape

Georgia’s average poverty rate was 13.5% in 2023, per the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, or 2.9% higher than the national rate.

This difference may seem slight, but it puts Georgia 38th in the country when it comes to poverty. Poverty rates in 133 of Georgia’s 159 counties also exceed the national rate.

Within counties, concentrations of poverty exist in particular cities. For example, Atlanta, the county seat of Fulton County, has a poverty rate of 18.1%. Poverty is even more concentrated among the city’s children, with 27.2% living in poverty. These numbers are significantly higher than the county’s average poverty rate of 12.6%.

Lawrenceville, in Gwinnett County, also struggles with concentrated poverty at a rate of 17.2%. The county’s average poverty rate is just 10.5%.

In many cases, poverty rates are higher than the state average in central and southern Georgia, suggesting concentrations of poverty in communities in those regions.

Impacts of increasing concentrations of poverty

In neighborhoods with higher poverty levels, residents experience many negative impacts, including limited access to quality education, healthcare, and employment opportunities. They also struggle with increased crime and inadequate housing and living conditions. These factors significantly hinder social and economic mobility and contribute to cycles of poverty that are difficult to escape.

Eric Cochling, the Georgia Center for Opportunity’s Chief Program Officer and General Counsel, noted:

“Poverty has an especially big impact at the local level. It’s a crisis of human well-being. These neighborhoods are often missing the vital community connections and social institutions that help people navigate life’s challenges. As social isolation and disengagement from work increase, people suffer from the loss of purpose and belonging that work and relationships provide.”

About the Georgia Center for Opportunity

The Georgia Center for Opportunity is a nonprofit organization that works to remove barriers to ensure that every person—no matter their race, past mistakes, or the circumstances of their birth—has access to safe communities, a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life. Learn more at foropportunity.org.

###

Georgia Center for Opportunity (GCO) is independent, non-partisan, and solutions-focused. Our team is dedicated to creating opportunities for a quality education, fulfilling work, and a healthy family life for all Georgians. To achieve our mission, we research ways to help remove barriers to opportunity in each of these pathways, promote our solutions to policymakers and the public, and help effective and innovative social enterprises deliver results in their communities.

Send media inquiries to:

Camille WalshGeorgia Center for Opportunitycamillew@foropportunity.org

Are we witnessing a Baltimore Miracle in the fight against crime?

by Rebecca Primis | Jul 3, 2025

Georgia news, in the news, current events, Georgia happenings, GA happenings

Are we witnessing a Baltimore Miracle in the fight against crime?

Joshua Crawford in The Baltimore Sun
Originally published July 3, 2025

By the mid-1990s, Boston was in a constant state of tumult. While homicides had been high since 1980, the six years from 1989-1995 would prove to be among the city’s deadliest, with 710 murders — 75 more than the preceding six-year period. Racial strife and police abuses riled the city after the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart — a pregnant white woman from the suburbs — whose murder was blamed on a young Black man by her husband, the actual killer.

For the foreseeable future, Boston was to be a place of violence, chaos and disorder. Only, that’s not what happened. Thanks to a team composed of the Boston Police Department, researchers from Harvard University and local religious leaders, an innovative approach called “Operation Ceasefire” dramatically reduced violent crime in the city. Over the next four years, youth homicides decreased in the city by 63%, and Boston has become one of the safest large cities in the country.

Governments and the media hailed that initial decrease as the “Boston Miracle.” Nearly three decades later, similar reductions in Baltimore deserve the same praise — if not more.

Baltimore has struggled with crime, especially drugs and violent crime, in both reality and in the imaginations of the American people for decades. Routinely in the top of the “most violent” or “least safe” city rankings, Baltimore has only had fewer than 200 murders three times since 1970.

In line with national trends, murder totals began increasing in the 1960s and then decreasing in the 1990s through 2014. Then, also in line with national trends, murder rose sharply in 2015 and remained elevated. Baltimore did not have fewer than 300 murders again until 2023, when a mix of best practices produced one of the most impressive declines in deadly violence in the nation’s recent history. Murder declined nearly 22% in 2023, and then another almost 23% in 2024 — erasing all of the post-2014 increases. Through May 1, 2025, homicides were down another 31%, putting Baltimore on pace for its fourth sub-200 murder year since 1970, and the city’s lowest total since the mid-1960s.

What happened?

Read the full article here.

Joshua Crawford is the Director of Criminal Justice Initiatives at the Georgia Center for Opportunity and the author of “Kids and Community Violence: Costs, Consequences, and Solutions” in the edited volume Doing Right by Kids.

Welfare stands in the way of the American dream

by Rebecca Primis | Jul 3, 2025

Op-Ed: Welfare stands in the way of the American dream

Randy Hicks in the Washington Examiner
Originally published July 3, 2025

As we celebrate Independence Day, we’ll be reminded of our inherent right to life, liberty, and one of our country’s most defining ideals: the American dream. Each of us has a picture of what the American dream looks like, but a common theme throughout is the ability to achieve what we want through hard work.

It’s important to remember, however, that there’s more to the American dream than money, promotions, or a nice house.

It’s what those things make possible. The economic markers associated with the American dream — income, upward mobility, homeownership — are not the ends in themselves. They’re tools. A good job and a house in a safe neighborhood matter not just because they are desirable, but because they create the space for something deeper: family, friendships, and community.

As humans, we are wired to connect with family members, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. This Fourth of July, it’s worth noting that meaningful relationships and a strong sense of community are as much a part of the American dream as any economic measure.

Unfortunately, our belief in that dream is dwindling. Just 53% of Americans think the American dream is still possible.

Clearly, something is amiss, and it’s more than the rising cost of owning a home. Our sense of community, once a defining feature of America, is also slipping away.

Despite being more technologically connected than ever, there is an epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Deaths from suicide, alcohol-related illness, or drug overdoses — “deaths of despair” — have more than doubled since the 1990s.

Meanwhile, very few Americans attend religious services, and a growing number of men have no close friends. Participation in traditional civic groups and community organizations continues to fall. Family formation is also on the decline. Americans aren’t getting married and aren’t having kids.

There are many reasons behind these cultural shifts. But what’s rarely discussed is how systemic obstacles are driving some of these troubling trends.

There are federal and state policies in place that make it harder to achieve what the American dream is all about: the freedom to shape your own future, build a family, and contribute to your community.

America’s safety net system, in particular, prevents people and families, especially from poorer backgrounds, from achieving the American dream.

Congress is thankfully considering reforms to this system for the first time in decades, including adding work requirements to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. It’s promising that we’re finally discussing the importance of connecting work to welfare. But work requirements will do little to fix the larger structural problems with the safety net system.

If lawmakers dug deeper, they’d find baked into these programs a phenomenon where beneficiaries are often discouraged from getting a job or a raise. They’d notice that our tax code penalizes welfare recipients for getting married and forming a family. And they’d discover that even if we implement work requirements, welfare agencies are not set up to help recipients find jobs. Welfare and workforce programs oddly operate in silos, making it difficult for people to access the support they need to secure employment.

These are policy failures that push people in the opposite direction of the American dream, into a life of dependency instead of self-determination —a life that makes it difficult not only to get ahead but to build meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose.

If the U.S. is going to continue to thrive, we need institutions and policies that don’t stand in the way of achieving the full extent of the American dream. That means a safety net that no longer discourages work, penalizes marriage, or traps people in a cycle of dependency.

Randy Hicks is the president and chief executive officer of the Georgia Center for Opportunity and founding member of the Alliance for Opportunity.

A better way to get welfare recipients back into the labor force

by Rebecca Primis | Jul 1, 2025

A better way to get welfare recipients back into the labor force

Randy Hicks in City Journal
Originally published July 1, 2025

House Republicans’ proposed Medicaid reforms have reignited a national conversation about work requirements. The GOP is right to argue that work is part of a good life, and that some program recipients should be required to hold a job.

But work requirements are only a first step. If the One Big Beautiful Bill becomes law, states will quickly discover that their administrative systems are ill-equipped to move recipients from welfare to work. To succeed, states should adopt a more integrated approach—one that provides access to both benefits and job training in a single location. The model for such an approach is Utah’s “One Door” strategy.

Today, nearly one in three Americans relies on some form of government assistance. But instead of helping vulnerable Americans get back on their feet, the safety net often keeps recipients mired in poverty, unable to break out of dependency and into self-reliance.

To understand why, consider the origins of America’s social welfare system. The modern safety net began in 1935 with the Social Security Act, followed by Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and cash welfare. Today, the government runs more than 80 assistance programs.

But these programs weren’t designed to operate together. In fact, calling them a “system” is misleading—there’s nothing systematic about them. Policymakers created the programs at different times, in response to different problems. Though the dollars start in Washington, they’re administered unevenly by the states. The result is a patchwork of siloed programs with overlapping goals, duplicative rules, disincentives to work, and little coordination of data or caseloads.

This complex maze dehumanizes millions of Americans in need. It forces low-income individuals to navigate countless forms, offices, and eligibility rules just to receive assistance. Few programs offer a clear path back into the workforce.

Yet work is essential to escaping poverty. Unemployment is a major driver of long-term dependency—and a key reason many people turn to welfare in the first place. Unfortunately, in nearly every state, the federally funded workforce training system operates entirely separate from the safety net.

Read the full article here.

Randy Hicks is the president and chief executive officer of the Georgia Center for Opportunity and cofounder of the Alliance for Opportunity.

What the release of California prisoners shows about recidivism rates

by Rebecca Primis | May 15, 2025

What the release of California prisoners shows about recidivism rates

Joshua Crawford on the Conway and Larson Show
Originally aired May 15, 2025

In this radio interview, host Leland Conway and Joshua Crawford discuss the implications of prisoner releases in California. They cover:

Impact on recidivism rates and whether releases have led to increased reoffending.
The broader effects of the releases on community safety.
Lessons that can be learned from California’s approach when it comes to crafting effective criminal justice policies.

Listen to the Interview

How to Fix Food Stamps? Wall Street Journal Looks to GCO’s Research for Answers

by Georgia Center for Opportunity | May 6, 2025

How to Fix Food Stamps? Wall Street Journal Looks to GCO’s Research for Answers

In “The Case for Fixing Food Stamps,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board considers the federal budget debate on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

They reference research published jointly by GCO and the American Enterprise Institute, which suggests how Congress can work more effectively with states to administer SNAP and get rid of program flaws that discourage work and upward mobility.

“But the food stamp dysfunction runs deeper. States manage the program but the feds pick up 100% of the benefits tab, which means states have an incentive to draw down more federal dollars. No wonder the program’s improper payment figure is north of 10%, according to Agriculture Department data.

Multiple policy analysts have proposals giving states a stake in the program, and President Trump’s 2018 budget included a version of the idea. Congress can ask states to pick up 10% of the benefits tab the first year, then 15% and perhaps eventually 25%. EPIC, the think tank, estimates the feds could save $250 billion over 10 years by phasing in a state share to 50%.

Governors of both parties won’t like a policy change that asks more of them. But states showed in the 1990s, after the federal welfare reform, that they could manage case loads and help people find their footing back into the private economy.

SNAP could use further reform because it discourages additional hours of work as recipients earn more income and lose benefits.”

Read the full article here.