L.A. County poverty rate jumps for third straight year to 17.5%

About one in six Los Angeles County residents were living below the poverty line last year, according to new estimates from the Census Bureau.

It was the third consecutive year of increases in the county’s poverty rate, which rose from just under 15% in 2007 to 17.5% in 2010. In the same period, inflation-adjusted median household income plunged $3,658 to $52,684.

Taken together, the data from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey provide a grim snapshot of conditions in the county after the recession officially ended in June 2009.

"We hoped that we would bounce out of the recession," said USC demographer Dowell Myers. Instead, he said, "The impacts of the recession are accumulating and escalating.... I would expect the data to be worse this year."

The one bright spot, Myers said, is that the poverty rate remains well below that recorded during the last recession in the early 1990s, when more than 20% of county residents fell below the poverty line. He attributed that to a more deeply rooted and resilient immigrant population than in the 1990s.