Five counties in the Washington area ranked among the wealthiest nationwide last year, and Maryland was named the highest-income state for the second year in a row.
Loudoun County had the highest median household income, at $107,207, according to 2007 statistics released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Fairfax, Arlington, Montgomery and Prince William counties also topped the lists, which divided its rankings based on county size.
Six other Maryland and Virginia counties also ranked among the wealthiest counties. Virginia ranked as the ninth-wealthiest state, and D.C. was 16th.
Despite those rosy figures, Anirban Basu, chief executive of the Sage Policy Group, an economic and policy consulting firm in Baltimore, warned that gains are not likely to continue.
“To the extent that some progress was made in 2007, those might be offset or more than offset by economic weakness in 2008, particularly in the latter half of the year,” he said.
While income may have increased for some Marylanders and Virginians in 2007, the needy populations of those states also grew.
In Maryland, 8.3 percent of the population fell under the poverty line in 2007, up from 7.8 percent, with 13.8 percent uninsured. In
Virginia, 9.9 percent of the population was in poverty in 2007, up from 9.6 percent last year, and 14.1 percent is uninsured.
“It’s a signal to the significant and growing divide in Virginia’s economy and the state as a whole that we have among the wealthiest communities in the country and yet we have growing rates of poverty, growing rates of uninsured and a stagnant median income for workers across the state,” said Michael Cassidy, executive director of the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis in Richmond.
The District posted a drop in poverty rates, from 19.6 percent in 2006 to 16.4 percent in 2007. According to the census data, 10.6 percent of D.C. residents are uninsured, down from 12.8 percent in 2006.
Yet Ed Lazare, executive director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, called the results “puzzling” and questioned the statistics. “There’s nothing to suggest from the economic or policy landscape why that might be happening,” he said.
Lazare pointed to the mostly stable unemployment rate, wages and food stamp use to back his claim. “Anybody who knows data would look at those numbers and say that just can’t be.”
David Johnson, chief of the Census Bureau’s Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, said a sampling problem is unlikely.
“We haven’t had any indication that there’s anything like that going on,” he said.
