After doing the plots of poverty rates and median incomes in suburban Portland, I decided to do the same for all incorporated communities in Marion County. I did this so I could be complete. Marion County has 19 incorporated communities, which is a good number to plot. These communities range from rural to urban, and some of them are heavily Hispanic. One of the problems with these data points is some of these towns are much smaller. Salem, the capital of Oregon, has a population of over 100,000, but a half dozen of these towns are 1000 people or less. I could actually do charts based on population, but we will save those for later.
Unlike the Portland-area suburb chart, this chart doesn't seem to have an obvious angle in it. It has a clear progression downwards, although with significant outliers. One of the differences between this chart and the Portland area one is that there are not really wealthy towns/suburbs in Marion County. There is only one town on this diagram that has over 50,000 a year in median income, or under 5% poverty. So perhaps this entire chart just resembles the "flat" section of the Portland-area one.Marion County has a high percentage of Hispanic residents, who tend to cluster in certain communities. I wondered if these Hispanic residents would have a correlation with poverty:
And once again, we have a three-quarters diagram! There are high poverty towns with both a high percentage of Hispanics and a low percentage, and there are low poverty towns with low Hispanic population, but there are no low poverty towns with high Hispanic populations.
However, since there is very few towns even in the category of "low poverty rate", it hardly makes for convincing data. And, as also discussed, some of the towns listed here are only a few hundred people. So, so far: nothing conclusive.
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