FLINT, MI--More than half of Flint's children are living in poverty.
According to new U.S. Census Bureau data from 2017, Flint is the poorest city of its size in the nation. Nearly 39 percent of the city's residents and 60 percent of its children are living in poverty.
The national average of children living in poverty is 21 percent, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.
Detroit was the sixth-most impoverished city and Dearborn was 10th, according to the data.
The bureau released its estimate of 2017 poverty rates last week for 608 municipalities nationwide with a population of at least 65,000.
Flint also had the nation's highest poverty rate in 2016.
Overall, the percentage of residents living in poverty decreased by 6 percentage points but the number of children living in poverty increased by 2 percentage points since 2016.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lists living below the poverty line as an annual income of $12,140 for a single individual.
The overall number of children living in poverty in Flint actually decreased from 15,360 in 2016 to 12,357 in 2017, according to census data.
However, the number of kids under the age of 5 living in poverty increased from 4,854 in 2016 to 5,027 in 2017, according to census data from the American Fact Finder.
A decrease in the city's population could inflate the child poverty rate despite a decrease in the number of kids living in poverty, said Data and Policy Advisor for Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan Joshua Rivera.
According to census data, the population in Flint has steadily declined since 2010. The population of whom poverty status is determined went down from 95,508 in 2016 to 94,144 in 2017.
With the population of Flint shrinking, those with lower incomes are making a larger percent of the population.
"As Flint's population gets smaller, the people who remain are facing more difficulties," Rivera said. "We know those who stay may be poorer so there are more kids that are poor."
It could be that those who are leaving the city don't have kids or have more years of education making them more mobile, and those that don't have the means to leave are staying and having more kids, Rivera explained.
"What we know is poverty among children under the age of five increased last year," Rivera said.
According to Rivera, childhood poverty is strongly tied to the economic status of their parents.
Overall, the number of people 16 years and older who are unemployed in the city has decreased. However, the demographics of those who are unemployed gives a mixed message on the economy in Flint.
The number of men who are unemployed and facing poverty increased to nearly 3,400 in 2017, up from roughly 2,500 in 2016. The number of women unemployed and facing poverty shrunk to roughly 1,900 residents in 2017, down from nearly 3,000 the year prior.
Rivera said it is hard to reach accurate conclusions on what the numbers mean because of Flint's changing population.
Instead, Rivera said someone can draw assumptions from the data based on what they do know and then use those assumptions to guide future research on the issue.