Using our own analysis of Census data and analysis done by Wilder Research for their Minnesota Compass city profiles, we’ve mapped the growth of suburban poverty in Minnesota. Click on any shaded area to see a city’s poverty profile (the darker the shade, the higher the poverty rate). We’ve excluded Minneapolis and St. Paul from the map.

Researchers warn of a looming health crisis in the wake of rising mortgage delinquencies and home foreclosures. The study, released October 20 in the American Journal of Public Health, is the first long-term survey of the impact the current housing crisis is having on older Americans.

Getting fruits and vegetables into the hands of low-income Minnesotans got a little bit easier this summer, as a growing number of farmers markets across the state allowed customers to pay with Electronic Benefit Transfer, or EBT cards — the replacement for food stamps.

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This week proposals to cut SNAP funding emerged during Senate debate on an FY 2012 appropriations bill (H.R. 2112). Anti-hunger groups reacted quickly, generating calls to Congress to reject any SNAP cuts, whether proposed on spending bills, deficit reduction plans or Farm Bill legislation.

Although House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., Senate Agriculture Committee ranking member Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and the American Farm Bureau Federation have called for an examination of the nutrition programs to look for waste, fraud and inefficiencies, Vilsack said in the interview he is reluctant to cut the food stamp program, saying that its budget authority was already red

White Earth Indian Reservation, Minn. — Hunger is such a problem on some parts of the White Earth Reservation that there is a neighborhood some people call Hungry Hill.

“It’s hard, you know, living day to day,” said 29-year-old Melissa Manypenny. “Especially when you have children, and it’s hard for you to feed your children from day to day.”

Manypenny and her boyfriend, Daniel St.

The recession officially ended more than two years ago. But the percentage of people living in poverty — with household incomes below $22,350 for a family of four — has continued to rise. Data released Thursday (September 22) by the U.S. Census Bureau show that 20 states saw a 20 percent or higher increase in the poverty rate from 2007, just before the Great Recession began, to 2010.

Scott County hit hardest by economic turbulence, data show

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Since the start of the recession, as millions of hardworking mothers and fathers struggle to find employment, they have turned to programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid, and Food Stamps to help weather the storm. These programs have responded exactly as intended.

The recession of 2008-09 wiped out more than a decade’s worth of earnings gains in Minnesota and has left nearly one in six U.S. residents in poverty.

The numbers, released Tuesday by the Census Bureau and collected during 2010, showed both the stark impact of the worst downturn since the 1930s and the sluggish pace of the weak recovery that has followed it.