COLLAPSIFORNIA: California tied with Louisiana for nation’s highest poverty rate in 2024
09/20/2025 // Zoey Sky // 1.1K Views
California has the highest poverty rate in the U.S., tied with Louisiana at 17.7 percent. This means nearly one in five Californians (or seven million people) live in poverty when the high cost of living is factored in.
The root cause is a suffocating cost of living, not a lack of jobs. The primary driver is an extreme housing crisis, where median rents routinely exceed $2,000 a month.
The crisis is not felt equally. Poverty rates for children and seniors exceed 20 percent.
The expiration of pandemic aid was a major catalyst. Government assistance like expanded tax credits and food aid had successfully cut California's poverty rate to a record low of 11 percent in 2021. When that support ended, the poverty rate surged dramatically.
The future outlook is bleak. High taxes, aggressive regulations and bureaucratic hurdles discourage housing development and drive businesses and high-income earners out of the state. This shrinks the tax base needed to fund social services, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that threatens to widen the nation's worst wealth gap even further.
In a stark juxtaposition that defies its sun-drenched, affluent image, California has officially tied Louisiana for the highest poverty rate in the United States. A new analysis reveals that in 2024, a staggering seven million Californians, which makes up 17.7 percent of the state's population, were living below the poverty line, a figure that mirrors the deep economic distress long associated with the Deep South.
https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-09-20-california-tied-with-louisiana-highest-poverty-rate-2024.html
