Challenges to Achieving Digital Equity or “Why Covered Populations Are Covered”

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s Digital Equity Act recognizes eight “covered populations” as disproportionately experiencing digital inequity. One group is individuals living in households with incomes at or below 150 percent of the poverty line.  In the United States, people living in poverty tend to be clustered in certain regions, counties, and neighborhoods rather than evenly spread across the nation. Research has shown that living in areas where poverty is prevalent creates impediments beyond people’s individual circumstances. Concentrated poverty contributes to poor housing and health conditions, higher crime and school dropout rates, and unemployment. As a result, economic conditions in very poor areas not only limit opportunities for poor residents but also replicate themselves. An important dimension of poverty is its persistence over time. There are 341 persistently poor counties in the United States (comprising 10.9 percent of all U.S. counties). The geography of persistent-poverty counties is strongly associated with historical patterns of rural settlement going back centuries. Historically, the large majority (approximately 85 percent) of persistent-poverty counties are nonmetro, accounting for about 15 percent of all nonmetro counties.