The Census Bureau recently came out with a bunch of data on US households from 2016. The data cover selected characteristics of households within different income groups. Here are the income groups along with the lower income limit for each:
In this final post in the American Households series, we’ll look at household income groups and type of household. First, a couple definitions:
Household: all people who occupy a housing unit regardless of relationship.
Family: group of two persons or more (one of whom is the head of household, or "householder") residing together and related by birth, marriage, or adoption.
Now the data:
Of the family households, almost half in the lowest household quintile are headed by women – 18% of the total for that quintile. That adds up to 75% of households within the lowest income quintile that are either families headed by women or individuals living alone. In other words, fathers living with their families are mostly missing from the poorest households in this country. This isn’t exactly news but at least we have an idea how big the problem is. In some future post, I’ll explore what happened to those fathers.