Poverty definition & 200% of poverty

[ODOT-RPTD-mb]

@PPaulsonOregonDOT New poverty level defined each year by Census Bureau. https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines

Can poverty definition be easily updated in TNExT? If not, is there a reasonable fix that simplifies poverty defintion updates?

Should poverty definition match census data date? I.e. 2010 census data poverty definition used with 2010 census data?

Does TNExT shift definition of poverty for projected census years? How is poverty data represented in TNExT? As income with a poverty level applied, or as poverty yes/no?

We want to add 200% of poverty metric to TNExT for STIF. It could also be useful to allow user to specify arbitrary poverty threshold as some % of federal poverty level.

[PPaulsonOregonDOT]

Using the demographic data the TNExT tool uses for 2010, my understanding is that the data is aggregated as a binary above/below poverty line, meaning that there's no income data to apply a new poverty line to each year, making it very hard to update this definition in the TNExT tool directly.

There is American Community Survey data that provides estimates of the population at different income levels at the census tract level for the state of Oregon, but the most recent version of the data is from 2016, and the income data is broken down by increments of $5,000 at the lower end, so it is unclear if that data would provide much utility, unless the poverty line shifted more than that in a given year.

The same dataset does include an estimate of the percentage of all people under the poverty line in the tract, which we could apply to the population of every census block in that tract to get block level estimates of how many people were under the poverty line at that time, but I don't know for certain that the poverty line they're using for this measure is the 2016 number or some other figure. I will try to do more research and get an answer to that question.

[ODOT-RPTD-mb]

Add 200% of poverty functionality. In a best case scenario user could set arbitrary % of poverty as a parameter for relevant reports.

[PPaulsonOregonDOT]

Given what I learned about STIF calculations, I think fixing this problem and getting to your best case scenario requires reworking the base demographic data, which should probably be combined with the work required to fix issue #152.

[anniekfifer]

@ODOT-RPTD-mb @ODOT-RPTD-sh Confirming that changing the poverty level cannot easily be done on an existing census. Data is imported as "below/above poverty level", TNEXT does not calculate poverty status.

It might be possible to change this but that would require some research and a decent amount of development. We would need to find a dataset for the same year(s)/geographic level that provides specific household income data for block groups that TNEXT could use to calculate poverty status, and add the functionality to update poverty level to TNEXT.

It would likely take less time and would be more accurate to update poverty level by just importing new census data if that's a viable option for ODOT. The consideration to weigh is, if ODOT expects to want to update poverty levels on existing data several times before importing new census data, it might be worth looking into adding that functionality. LMK if ODOT wants to explore this option and I can provide an estimate, but if so I may request help from ODOT for researching datasets.