I'm only guessing, but up north we tend to have an older established poverty. In some places like Vermont's New East Kingdom, it's even heralded as having it's own beauty(the area and people are beautiful, poverty isn't). The iconic tumbledown paint-less houses the wind blows through, the farmers barns with the doors hanging on one hinge.

You get the right camera angle of a vase of flowers, through a rotted window sash with half the glazing missing, and you could have the cover of Vermont Life. Zoom out your lens, and you'll see people starving to death.

In Maine we have a chasm dividing the tiny slender Gold Coast and "The County"(Arrostock-largest county), and much of enormous inland Maine.