The Southern California Association of Governments issued a scathing report Friday claiming the six-county region has lost significant ground in the past decade on employment and income growth, traffic congestion, education levels and housing affordability.

Only two areas showed signs of improvement: air quality and violent crime, which has been reduced.

The 121-page report points out that nearly one in six Southern California residents live in poverty. In 2003, nearly 15 percent of all residents and 20 percent of children in the six-county region lived in poverty, defined as $18,810 a year for a family of four.

Ping Chang, author of the “State of the Region 2004,” said the high poverty rate could be attributed primarily to the large foreign-born and immigrant population.

“Almost one in three residents here is born in a foreign country, so when they come, they generally start at a low socio-economic level,” he said. “From that perspective, we might have already gone through the most challenging years, though our ties to globalization produce large disparities in income.”

Compared with the 17 largest regions in the nation, Southern California ranked dead last behind greater Detroit, Cleveland, Sacramento and Cincinnati in real personal income per capita.

Southern California added 1 million new residents between 2000 and 2003, accounting for more than 10 percent of population growth in the U.S. The six-county region including Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial counties now has 17.7 million residents.

Rising real estate prices also have made Southern California one of the most expensive, least-affordable housing markets, with just one-third of residents able to afford a median-priced home, now at $500,000 in Orange County and $350,000 in Riverside.

On the transportation front, it takes residents an average of 28 minutes to travel to work but the region saw a 1.5 percent drop in the number of residents carpooling. Still, roughly 13.5 percent of the working population carpool, the highest rate in the nation.

SCAG, an association mandated by the federal government to create regional air quality and transportation plans, is the largest of nearly 700 such associations in the U.S.