Introduction

There is often a lack of accommodations for people with disabilities at workplaces. This makes it very hard for disabled to earn income, and thus, they are often classified in the low-income category of people. Using this as our driving idea, we used data from the Current Population Survey 1 and US Census to understand income inequalities in mainland US. To further understand the income disparities in people with disabilities, we looked at the state of Texas, a state that has a disability rate of about 11.7% to 13.1% 2 and that we discovered has the lowest average income per 10,000 people in mainland US.

Average Income (per 10,000 people) in the United States (Mainland)

To investigate the average income across different states in mainland United States, we integrated data from the person_house dataset, as well as census data from 2021. The above map shows the average income per 10,000 people across 40 states. There is no specific trend or pattern in the distribution, besides the fact that average income per 10,000 people in states in the south and midwest lies between $10,000 and $34,999. From our map, we can also see that there is only one state where the average income per 10,000 people is below $10,000: Texas. To further analyze income disparities among disabled individuals, we looked at data from households and individuals in Texas.

Median Household Income by TX County

This graph uses census data to explore income at Texas specifically, and looking at median household income, rather than personal income. Since living standards and poverty are often relative, this gives a better idea of what low, medium, and high income looks like for Texas households. The threshold for high income Texas households ($65,600) is still lower than the national median household income, which is consistent with our previous observation that Texas has the lowest average personal income of all mainland US states. High income households also seem to center around urban areas, like Dallas, Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.

Percent of Disabled Texans in Poverty by County

In this map we investigated the percent of disabled people in poverty in each Texas county and hope to compare this against our previous map of Median Household Income by County. Data from this map comes from Disability Counts which provides a variety of very comprehensive data sets relating to disability in the US. 3 This map shows each Texas county and is colored according to 4 different bins: 0-15%, 15.1-19.6%, 19.6-24%, and >24% disabled poverty rate. These four bins were calculated based on the distribution of the data, each bin holding the same number of data points. This map is very relevant when compared with our earlier map for a few reasons. There are 2 counties with high income and disabled poverty rate >26%, 32 counties with low income and disabled poverty rate >26%, 10 counties with low income and disabled poverty rate <15%, and 33 counties with high income and disabled poverty rate <15%. This shows that overwhelmingly high disabled poverty rates occur in low income counties, while low disabled poverty rates are less common in high income counties.

Summary

Ethical Concerns

Most of the data used for this report was census data. While this means that there is a lot of data to work with, the American census has historically struggled with representing groups that either distrust the government or are difficult to access, such as unhoused individuals, those who do not speak English, undocumented immigrants, low income individuals, and disabled individuals. Since we are specifically looking at low income and disabled populations, it is very possible that the census data may underrepresent the key demographics we are investigating.

Policy Implications

Our key takeaway for this project is that the disabled poverty rate, specifically in Texas is significantly higher in low income areas, although overall very high regardless of average income in a given county. In order to protect those who are most vulnerable we should focus on policies that affect disabled people in poverty, specifically those living in poor counties. Although many more wealthy disabled people can afford accommodations such as mobility aids, food delivery, and adequate healthcare and access to caretakers, disabled people in poverty often cannot. For this reason, there should be a greater emphasis put on expanding these resources to disabled people in poverty.

  1. Bureau, U. C. (2023, October 20). Current population survey (CPS). Census.gov. https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps.html ↩︎

  2. Kraus, L., Lauer, E., Coleman, R., and Houtenville, A. (2018). 2017 Disability Statistics Annual Report. Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire↩︎

  3. https://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu/geography/DataLookupTool.asp#step1↩︎