Poor Pay More -- Report Documents High Price of Being Broke

Based on an analysis of prices in 12 metropolitan areas -- including New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles -- the report concluded that households with annual incomes below $30,000 pay higher-than-average prices for necessities such as groceries, check cashing, short term loans, car loans and home loans.

"There's a reluctance among some retailers to put their 'A game' into the inner city," said Jonathan Lange, a former organizer with Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, a social justice advocacy organization.

"We all know that price is dependent on supply and demand, and if demand is fairly high for a certain sort of goods, and there's not a lot of offerings on the supply side, prices are going to be higher and companies are going to take advantage of that."

In poorer neighborhoods, grocery stores tended to be smaller and more expensive, the report found, while families making more than $30,000 were more likely have access to mid- and large-sized supermarkets where prices were cheaper.

At 3,000 of 21,000 stores analyzed, researchers calculated the average price for 132 food products over a 52-week period, determining that prices for 67 percent of those products were more expensive at the smaller stores.

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