We’re becoming accustomed to seeing Des Moines and its suburbs mentioned on “best places” lists, but last week brought a different perspective that is, if not a matter for celebration, at least reassuring.

A national report on poverty from the Brookings Institution provides evidence that Central Iowa has been making its upward climb without casting its less fortunate citizens aside.

The unadorned poverty statistics put us just a little ahead of many other cities. The statistics show that the city proper had 27,700 people living in poverty, out of a population of 186,026, or about 15 percent. Not wonderful, but better than the 18 percent number for Kansas City and the 23 percent for Milwaukee.

But it’s another angle that confirms our feeling that, socially speaking, Des Moines is still more like a big Iowa town than a city.

The Brookings researchers looked at “concentrated poverty,” or the number of poor people living in “extreme poverty” neighborhoods.

Why? To consider “the extent to which poor residents in the community are subjected to the ‘double burden’ of being poor in a highly disadvantaged neighborhood.”

Traveling Iowans think about that when they see a run-down section in a big city. What would it be like to be not just poor, but surrounded by evidence that crushing poverty is the norm?

Divide the number of citizens living in extreme poverty by the population of the city of Des Moines, and you get a 4.8 percent rate of concentrated poverty. That compares with 20.5 percent for both Kansas City and Minneapolis, and 32 percent for Milwaukee.

Do the same math for the metro area and the result is a modest 2.9 percent. In Omaha, the corresponding figure is 9.1 percent.

That doesn’t mean that we can congratulate ourselves and forget about poverty. But we can be proud that we haven’t allowed our neighborhoods to drop below the point where hope disappears.