There's definitely different levels of poverty. Rural American poverty is different from urban American poverty, there's different problems. We didn't have pest problems, but one of the houses we lived in had severe mold that caused health problems (so we had to move). We didn't have gun violence or drugs, but we chopped and burned wood from the area to heat our house through the cold winters because we couldn't afford fuel. We didn't go hungry, but only because we got heavily subsidized or free lunches from the school. We had our electricity shut off on several occasions. I was lucky in the sense that we lived within the territory of a decent school district, so I was able to dig a computer out of the school dumpster that only had a failed hard drive, which I fixed and used to teach myself programming (by this point, we could at least afford internet service). It wasn't consistently like that, and not as bad as what you described, but it was absolutely still poverty.