Buffalo strikes out in income report - Business First of Buffalo:

Buffalo strikes out in income report - Business First of Buffalo:

Buffalo strikes out in income report

Business First of Buffalo - 1:50 PM EDT Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Buffalo remains one of the poorest big cities in America, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released on Tuesday.

The typical Buffalo household earned $27,850 in income last year, the third-lowest reading for any city with at least 250,000 residents. The only cities that finished lower were Cleveland, with a median household income of $26,535, and Miami, with a median of $27,088.

Each city's median is its midpoint, which means that half of Buffalo's households earned more than $27,850 last year, and half earned less.

Buffalo did even worse in a second category, with 29.9 percent of its residents falling below the federal poverty level.

Poverty status is determined according to a sliding scale that takes income and household size into account.

Detroit was the only major city with a higher poverty rate, 32.5 percent.

The Census Bureau report focused specifically on cities, not metropolitan areas. That means Buffalo's statistics are confined to the city itself and do not include its suburbs.

Plano, Texas, a large suburb of Dallas, did the best on both indicators. It accumulated the largest household income, with a 2006 median of $77,038, and it had the smallest poverty rate, 5.1 percent.