Considering support for people with disabilities and how this varies is pertinent, with October being U.S. National Disability Employment Awareness Month. A related area impacting on disability support is the average monthly Social Security disability benefit, which in the U.S. stands $1,126.02. Based on this level, this is fairly close to the poverty line. This is based on an assessment of the 9,763,000 people in the U.S. who are registered as having a disability (of these, 8,273,000 are classed as ‘disabled workers’).
However those classed as disabled fare better in some U.S. cities compared with others. This is indicated from data compiled by the personal-finance website WalletHub. The company has released a new report into this topic, titled “2020’s Best & Worst Cities for People with Disabilities.”
For the analysis, WalletHub examined most big U.S. cities and looked at these in relation to over thirty indicators of ‘disability-friendliness’. The data set included criteria such as the level of wheelchair-accessible facilities per capita and the proportion of workers with disabilities; and the relative quality of the local hospital system.
The video below shows how the metrics were calculated:
In terms of the outcomes (where 182 major cities were assessed), the best cities for those registered with disabilities were found to be:
1. Scottsdale, AZ
2. St. Louis, MO
3. South Burlington, VT
4. Huntington Beach, CA
5. Bismarck, ND
6. Minneapolis, MN
7. Denver, CO
8. Overland Park, KS
9. San Francisco, CA
10. Pittsburgh, PA
In contrast, those cities offering less support and care were:
173. Moreno Valley, CA
174. Knoxville, TN
175. Juneau, AK
176. Worcester, MA
177. San Bernardino, CA
178. Winston-Salem, NC
179. New Haven, CT
180. Providence, RI
181. Gulfport, MS
182. Bridgeport, CT
Not featuring in either the top or bottom 10 is Cleveland, Ohio, which has the highest proportion of people with disabilities living in the locale (at 20 percent). This contrasts with Pearl City, Hawaii, which has the lowest proportion (at under 9 percent) of the population.
