A snapshot of poverty in the state shows progress – but also a huge number of families struggling to survive. The Missouri Poverty Snapshot from Empower Missouri and the Coalition on Human Needs shows the portion of low-income folks fell by more than half a percentage point since 2016. But Jeanette Mott Oxford with Empower Missouri says it also showed nearly eight hundred thousand people living below the poverty line – many of them children.
The report found a sizable majority of the poor live in households where one or more people work. But it also found that more than half of households earning less than twenty thousand dollars a year had to spend the majority of their income to pay rent every month.