Census: No Sign of Economic Rebound for many

English: US Census map of poverty across US (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Depending on education, race, income and even marriage, not all segments of the population are seeing an economic turnaround.

Poverty is on the rise in single-mother families. More people are falling into the lowest-income group. And after earlier signs of increased mobility, fewer people are moving as homeownership declined for a fifth straight year.

"We're in a selective recovery," said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who analyzed the numbers.

Nearly 2.2 million children were poor in California last year, the most of any state, but the child poverty rate was highest in Mississippi, where more than 1 in 3 children was poor. Nationwide, child poverty stood at 21.8 percent, unchanged from the previous year.

"Stubbornly high child poverty rates in the wake of the Great Recession suggest we have not yet turned the corner three years after its official end," said Marybeth Mattingly, director of research on vulnerable families at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute.

The numbers also reflect widening economic inequality, an issue President Barack Obama has pledged would be a top priority of his administration to address. Upward mobility in the U.S. has been hurt by a tight job market and the longer-term disappearance of midskill jobs due to globalization and automation.

The new census data shows that lower-income households are a steadily increasing share of the population, while middle- to higher-income groups shrank or were flat. Read more >>