North End Neighborhoods:

Report on Unemployment and Job Training

Hudson Huth
The North End of Lafayette—as defined by the neighborhoods of Lincoln, Monon, Hanna,
Historic Jefferson, St. Lawrence McAllister, and Vinton—faces a disproportionately high level
of poverty in relation to the Lafayette area. This report will present the comparative findings
from the Polk Directory and offer analysis on the data.
The Polk Directory is limited in how it can report on poverty. These limitations are:
 No metric for unemployment.
 No specific information on impoverished minors.
 No employment data as it relates to industry or location.
Some assumptions and accommodations are made to adjust for these limitations:
1. Data will reference households, not individuals. Households can be individuals, but can
also refer to marital couples with or without children. This report will explicitly
differentiate between single-person and multi-person households when necessary.
2. Unemployment will be redefined as “At-Risk Households” and “low-income
households”. At-risk households are those with a household income less than $20,000.
Less than $20,000 is the lowest categorical metric recorded in the Polk Directory.
3. Databases other than the Polk Directory will be used to supplement the information
contained in the Polk Directory.

Household Poverty
There are 2,136 at-risk households in the North
End of Lafayette, this correlates to 2,822
individuals and 73.43 percent of the households
in the North End.1 The largest concentration of
low-income households is in the St. Lawrence
McAllister neighborhood, while the Historic
Jefferson Neighborhood has the highest
percentage of low income households, at 94.92
percent. The least impoverished neighborhood,
by this metric, is Vinton, with only 47.85
percent of households seeing an income of less
than $20,000.32
2

1
Polk City Directories. Lafayette, Indiana. Accessed March 2, 2018.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
 This data can be further broken
down by home ownership and
type of home. What we find is
that a majority of these at-risk
individuals are renters, likely
over 50 percent. This number is
surprisingly low, but is also
dependent on neighborhood. In
Vinton, 77.72 percent of
individuals are home owners,
while only 5.51 percent of
individuals in Historic Jefferson
are home owners.4 This marks a
clear divergence between certain
neighborhoods in the North End
as it applies to household poverty.
5

Childhood Poverty in the North End

Children are often considered the most vulnerable population when referencing impoverished
people because there are very few avenues for children to exit poverty until they reach adulthood.
In the North End, there are an estimated 1,173 children, 409 of these children can be considered
at-risk by the metric defined in this report—approximately 35 percent of children in the north end
live in poverty.6 For comparison, 73.4 percent of adults in the North End live in low-income homes.

5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
While childhood poverty is of particular importance due to the vulnerability of the population, the
overwhelming majority of those affected by lack of income are adults. For all low-income
households in the North End, 89 percent have no children; a majority of this 89 percent are single
adults.

Gender Differences in Low Income Households

Of the residents of the North End, 50.2 percent
are male and 45.3 percent are female (with 4.5
percent not reporting). Women in the North
End are disproportionately affected by
poverty. There are 1113 women and 907 men
living in low-income homes—the remaining
116 people did not record their gender.83 As a
whole, women are 10 percent more likely to
be impoverished than men.
Marital status changes these statistics
significantly. There are 50 percent more
single women living with low income than
9 single men, widening the gender-poverty gap.
However, there are 200 percent more married men living with low income than married women.104
This data provides that single women are more vulnerable than single men, and women in the
North End can use marriage to exit poverty at much higher rates than men. The cases of
single/married men and women are likely symptomatically different as well. Single men may have
more resources to pursue well-paying jobs than women do, resulting in a lower count of
impoverished men than women despite a
higher total population of men. What form
these resources take is yet to be determined.
With this data, it can be assumed that a
generalized approach to addressing the issue
of poverty will be ineffective. There are a
number of ways to differentiate and
categorize affected populations. This data
serves to illustrate the small but significant
differences between at-risk peoples in the
North End, and by realizing these
differences, these groups may be better
served.
11

8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.