Poorer relative to the other neighbors, not poorer in absolute terms.
Exactly, and the term "needier" conveys an extra piece of the puzzle that these data do not support. Steve Jobs is poorer than Bill Gates by an order of magnitude, but he's hardly needy.
For housing, your relative slice of a community's wealth is actually a pretty good predictor which bits of land/housing you'll be able to buy / live on, since real-estate prices in a region tend to rise with its GDP.
Exactly, a fancy house and an expensive SUV may mean they're deeper down in debt.
They may have less net worth, but that doesn't mean they have income to the point that we could consider them "poor". I would really like to know what the median income is within each quintile of wealth distribution.
If you're the kind of person that frequents HN, I would have thought you'd have the google skills to find that out.