This morning the Census Bureau released the 2023 American Community Survey data. As a reminder, this data is our best annual look at the socio-economic characteristics of Oregonians. Our office mines this data every year, especially once the microdata comes out in a month, to better understand what is happening when it comes to income, employment, working from home, household formation and the like, and then broken down by age, race and ethnicity, region of the state and so on. Today, in my last post on this site, I am going to provide the typical high-level summary when it comes to household income and poverty in Oregon. Look out for either future posts from Carl, Jordan, and Mitchell, or in our next forecast document which is coming out November 20th for more details on what the 2023 ACS data show.
Big picture, the good news is the typical Oregon household’s income has never been higher even after accounting for inflation. Oregon’s median household income increased 6% before inflation in 2023, and 2.1% in real, or inflation-adjusted terms last year. That increase ranked 6th highest nationwide across all states. Over the entire cycle to date, 2019 to 2023, Oregon’s median income increased 19.5% in nominal terms, although that’s just 2.8% in real terms due to the surge in inflation, which ranks 21st strongest across the country. As of 2023, Oregon’s median household income was 3.1% higher than the national median, making our relative vantage point today the highest on record going back to the 1970 Census (which is when my file started, in part because in older decennial census the measure was family income not household income).
Looking at the different components that drive household income, by far the biggest factor both last year and in recent years is wages per worker. Median earnings for full-time workers rose 5.3% last year before inflation and have averaged 5.1% per year since 2019.
In terms of household income by race and ethnicity, growth has been strongest among BIPOC Oregonians. Keep in mind that Oregon’s relatively low levels of diversity and small samples sizes can cause some numbers to bounce around quite a bit, even if there is an underlying trend. In recent years that trend has been for narrower racial disparities.
Looking across the nation’s metro areas, Oregon’s are all right about the typical metro or stronger. This chart shows the median household income change on the horizontal or x axis and the average income change on the vertical or y axis. Similar patterns to a year ago, where Oregon has seen much stronger household income gains in both the Bend metro, and down in the Rogue Valley. The other metros, including Portland, are at or near the income gains seen elsewhere in the country.
Next, let’s turn our focus from income gains to changes in poverty among Oregonians. This can be a bit confusing but there are two different measures of poverty — the official poverty measure, and the supplemental poverty measure — and two different data sources — the CPS ASEC and the ACS. We will stick with the official poverty measure as reported in the ACS to start.
From 2022 to 2023, Oregon’s poverty rate ticked up slightly from 12.1 to 12.2 percent, which is a bit below the US figure. Poverty is up from the multidecade low reached just prior to the pandemic, and in the first year of the pandemic, but is lower than it has been throughout the rest of the 2000s and 2010s (that’s because, on average, the economy in the 2000s and 2010s was bad given the two recessions and jobless recoveries that followed.) Even so, 1 in 8 Oregonians lives below the federal poverty line today.
While much of the economic news this cycle has been good, one item that has stood out in recent years has been the increase in the number of Oregonians in deep poverty. These are Oregonians whose income is less than half the official poverty level. This means <$7,000 for an individual, or <$15,000 for a family of four, for example. Overall the number of Oregonians around the poverty threshold (either just below it or just above it) is steady to down, but there is the increase in those in deep poverty. Another place this pattern shows up in the data is with household income growth among the lowest quintile, or bottom 20% of the distribution showing the weakest gains.
This final chart updates our office’s look at the racial poverty gap in Oregon. The gap remains smaller today than it has been at any point prior to the pandemic, but it did increase a bit in the 2023 data. This is due to both poverty for white, non-Hispanic Oregonians ticking down, and BIPOC poverty ticking up. The biggest change has been a slow rise in poverty among Hispanic and Latino Oregonians in recent years. The good news embedded in this chart is that 2023 registered historic lows for poverty among both Black and American Indian Oregonians.
Take care everyone.