Concentrated poverty

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South Africa Poverty Density

Concentrated poverty concerns the spatial distribution of socio-economic deprivation, specifically focusing on the density of poor populations. [1] Within the United States, common usage of the term concentrated poverty is observed in the fields of policy and scholarship referencing areas of "extreme" or "high-poverty." These are defined by the US census as areas where "40 percent of the tract population [lives] below the federal poverty threshold." [2] A large body of literature argues that areas of concentrated poverty place additional burdens on poor families residing within them, burdens beyond what these families' individual circumstances would dictate. Research also indicates that areas of concentrated poverty can have effects beyond the neighborhood in question, affecting surrounding neighborhoods not classified as "high-poverty" and subsequently limiting their overall economic potential and social cohesion. Concentrated poverty is a global phenomenon, with prominent examples world-wide. [3] Despite differing definitions, contributing factors, and overall effects, global concentrated poverty retains its central theme of spatial density. Multiple programs have attempted to ameliorate concentrated poverty and its effects within the United States, with varying degrees of progress and to sometimes detrimental effect. [4]

Contents

History in the United States

A long-standing issue, concentrated poverty creates distinct social problems, exacerbating individual impoverishment and standing as the grounds of reform movements and studies since the mid-19th century. An analytical conception and measure for concentrated emerged in the United States around the 1970s, sparked by concern for its inner cities following deindustrialization, late-1960s civil unrest, rapid suburbanization, and subsequent out-migration. Most inner-city areas of concentrated poverty contained predominantly minority populations, featuring expansive public housing developments. The Bureau of the Census developed the first definition of "low-income areas" as part of its work for the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity, an organization designed to administer President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty programs, part of his Great Society legislative agenda. Overall, these programs were intended to identify major poverty concentrations within large metropolitan areas. An attribute-based criterion formed the original definition, with census tracts ranked by the following:

  1. Income
  2. Average level of education
  3. Number of single-parent households
  4. Percentage of low-skilled workers
  5. Quality of housing stock

Of these, the lowest quartile were designated "low income." Following the 1970 census, attribute-based measures were translated to purely statistical ones, defining "low-income areas" as census tracts with 20%–39% of inhabitants falling under the poverty line, and labeling areas with 40% or more impoverished inhabitants as "high" or "extreme" poverty. Calibration of household income statistics most closely approximating the 1960 census lower quartile lead to the adoption of the 20% threshold adopted in 1970. The 40% threshold designating "high-poverty" areas was set by doubling the low-income threshold, becoming the common definition of "concentrated poverty" in policy and scholarly research.

Paul Jargowsky later developed an alternative measure for concentrated poverty, used more specifically for larger geographical areas. His rate expresses the proportion of all poor individuals in a certain area (e.g., city, metropolitan region, or county) who live in census tracts of high poverty. [5] Jargowsky further refined the concept of concentrated poverty to more specifically describe the "proportion of the poor in some region city or region that resides in high-poverty neighborhoods," as opposed to a simple territorial designation of high-poverty neighborhoods. [6]

William Julius Wilson's book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy was the first major scholarly work utilizing the census measure to study changing spatial trends in poverty, as well as its causes and effects. [7] According to his findings, tracts of concentrated poverty increased dramatically throughout metropolitan areas of the United States during the 1970s, alongside the population of poor people residing within them. These trends related specifically to an African American "underclass" in America's inner cities (see trends below). In this work, Wilson utilizes concentrated poverty as an analytic measure to gauge the changing spatial organization and intensification of poverty, as a territorial category to designate an object of analysis, and also as a causal factor in and of itself, effecting life chances among the poor. All three conceptualizations have since served as the basis for a wide range of social science research, as well as policy interventions and prescriptions.

Analytic measure

Wilson's study both set the precedent of using the census' 40% threshold and has been adopted as the standard measure for the study of poverty trends and poor neighborhoods. Its standardization is largely credited to the measure's convenience, as opposed to any conceptual justifications, and is employed to compare degrees of poverty concentration between areas, as well as the growth or decline in total number of tracts fitting such qualifications within a given city, region, or country.

Both the federal definition of poverty and the census definition of concentrated poverty (40% threshold) have received criticism. The overall discussion for both cases has labeled the use of bureaucratic categories intended to facilitate both the routine collection of statistics and public assistance eligibility as unfit for comprehensively capturing urban social structures and strategies. Many criticisms revolve around the poverty threshold, the most prominent including the inability to fully consider the needs of different family types (e.g.: childcare services, health insurance, etc.), the non-cash benefits from public sources, the cash and non-cash resources (or lack thereof) from social and familial networks, and the consideration of regional variations in cost of living expenses. [8] Concurrently, the 40% benchmark used by the census and various scholars to define concentrated poverty does not refer to any adequately specific objective or subjective criteria. Jargowsky and Bane (1991) assert “...that the 40 percent criterion came very close to identifying areas that looked like ghettos in terms of their housing conditions” (p. 239). They contend that “the areas selected by the 40 percent criterion corresponded closely with the neighborhoods that city officials and local Census Bureau officials considered ghettos” (p. 239). Thus, these scholars argued that although “any fixed cutoff is inherently arbitrary...the 40 percent criterion appropriately identifies most ghetto neighborhoods” (p. 239). Here we observe the threshold's justification on the basis of general personal impressions and impressions of city officials rather than any rigorous objective criteria. [9]

In addition to contentious debate regarding the selection of particular percentage thresholds as accurate descriptive measures (i.e. 30% vs. 60% threshold of residents in poverty), other scholars criticized the use of an absolute indicator of poverty concentration as an analytic measure and tool for trend tracking. In one instance, researchers Massey and Eggers contend that a relative, segregation-based indicator is more rigorous and meaningful, claiming that ". . .levels and trends in poverty concentration are best studied with well-established measures of segregation that use complete information on the spatial distribution of income instead of an ad hoc and arbitrary definition of 'poverty neighborhoods' and 'poverty concentration'" [10] Based on a recent growth of working poor populations and emergence of inner-suburban poverty, Jennifer Wolch and Nathan Sessoms have challenged the utility of the traditional 40% threshold concept of concentrated poverty. [11] Their study shows that several areas in Southern California, which meet the 40% threshold, do not demonstrate the characteristics traditionally associated with areas of concentrated poverty, and do not suffer from extreme levels of dysfunction, crime, and blight. Additionally, they are often reasonably clean, safe, well-maintained, and home to several commercial/retail establishments, public facilities, etc. They also argue that the term has become conflated with "areas of social problems" and argue that the concept should be unhooked from behavioral definitions and stigma.

Territorial category

Areas of concentrated poverty as a territorial category have become both key targets of place-specific policy interventions and the object of analysis for comparative studies within policy research and the social sciences. Its use as a territorial category has also resulted in several critiques, beginning with the question of whether census tracts are good spatial categories for social-scientific analysis. Systematic field observations in various inner-city areas reveal that census tracts serve as poor proxies of what residents construe and construct as neighborhoods in their daily routines. [12] Sociologist Loic Wacquant criticized the measure when used to denote or define “ghettos," a reference first made by Bane and Jargowsky and William Julius Wilson (see above). Scholars increasingly conflate areas of concentrated poverty and ghettos, something Wacquant claims camouflages the constitutive role of ethnoracial domination in the ghetto and hyperghetto. According to Wacquant, this income-based notion of the ghetto is "ostensibly deracialized" and largely a product of policy-geared research fearful of the "strict taboo that weighs on segregation in the political sphere". [13] Massey and Denton similarly question the use of a purely income-based measure to define areas of deprivation, showing strong empirical evidence and theorizing that high levels of racial segregation (defined by an index of dissimilarity above 60) produce distinct socio-economic constellations and processes. [14] Additional questions by Wacquant include why rural communities and suburban tracts are often left out of social science analyses focusing on concentrated poverty.

Causal factor

Concentrated poverty is increasingly recognized as a "causal factor" in compounding the effects of poverty by isolating residents from networks and resources useful for realizing human potential (explored further in the effects section). William Julius Wilson coined these processes in The Truly Disadvantaged as "concentration effects." He termed the primary effect "social isolation", defined as the lack of contact or sustained interaction with individuals and institutions representing mainstream society. This isolation makes it much more difficult for those looking for jobs to be tied into the job network, also generating behavior not conducive to good work histories. A key in Wilson's idea of social isolation is the linking of behavioral outcomes of the ghetto poor to the structural constraints of the job market and historical discrimination. This contradicts the theory of a "culture of poverty," which stipulated that basic values and attitudes of the ghetto subculture have been internalized, placing a strong emphasis on the autonomous character of these cultural traits once they come into existence. [15]

Many scholars have called to question this causal framing. For Wilson, concentrated poverty stood as a link between structural factors and social behaviors produced through the "concentration effects" of poverty. Subsequent policy and scholarly research have ignored such causes. According to Agnew, "one can start out using spatial concepts as shorthand for complex sociological processes but slip easily into substituting the spatial concepts for the more complex argument". [16] Steinberg has claimed that this amounts to misdiagnosing the symptom as the disease, as the structural factors are severed from the spatial outcome, policy prescriptions to address concentrated poverty have shifted from economic policies to encourage full-employment to simply deconcentrating poverty (see section below). [17] As Goetz observed, “Over time, focus has shifted away from the causes of concentrated poverty toward the behavior of the poor in response to concentrated poverty," which ultimately has led to reproducing the "culture of poverty" thesis in severing the theory from its structural roots. [18]

Causes

The shifting spatial distribution of poverty is attributed to various structural factors, primarily of an economic nature. According to William Julius Wilson in the 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy, the driving forces of American concentrated poverty date back to the 1970s. [7] The following are some causes outlined in Wilson's book:

Effects

Several studies have pointed to the role of "neighborhood effects" caused by concentrated poverty. These studies indicate that neighborhood characteristics, particularly the concentration of poverty, affect crime and delinquency, education deficiencies, psychological distress, and various health problems, among many other issues. Thresholds, or tipping points, also prove important. [20] In a recent review of research, George C. Galster notes that studies suggest “that the independent impacts of neighborhood poverty rates in encouraging negative outcomes for individuals like crime, school leaving, and duration of poverty spells appear to be nil unless the neighborhood exceeds about 20 percent poverty, whereupon the externality effects grow rapidly until the neighborhood reaches approximately 40 percent poverty; subsequent increases in the poverty population appear to have no marginal effect.” [21] Housing values and rents show similar patterns. Using data from the 100 largest U.S. metro areas from 1990 to 2000, Galster et al. find little relationship between neighborhood poverty rates and declines in neighborhood housing values and rents until poverty exceeds 10 percent, at which point values decline rapidly before becoming shallower at very high poverty levels. [22]

The Pew Economic Mobility Project conducted one of the largest studies examining concentrated poverty's effects, tracking 5,000 families since 1968. The study found that no other factor, including parents' education, employment, or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why African-American children were disproportionately more likely to have lower incomes than their parents as adults. [23] Thus, the concentrated poverty rate aims to capture the extent of a possible “double burden” imposed on poor families living in extremely poor communities; both being poor and living in a poor community. The study also found negative effects on the better-off children raised in such areas. While initial research failed to isolate the direct effects of "concentrated poverty" itself, more recent work has shifted to identifying its primary mechanisms. This scholarship us primarily focused on examining the social-interactive and institutional aspects produced through concentrated poverty, rather than a sole focus on the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods. Below is an overview of these effects and mechanisms. [24] [21]

Mechanisms

(From George C. Galster, "The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications").

Social interactive effects

This set of mechanisms refers to social processes endogenous to neighborhoods. These processes include:

  • Social contagion: Behaviors, aspirations, and attitudes may be changed by contact with peers who are neighbors. Under certain conditions these changes can take on contagion dynamics that are akin to “epidemics.”
  • Collective socialization: Individuals may be encouraged to conform to local social norms conveyed by neighborhood role models and other social pressures. This socialization effect is characterized by a minimum threshold or critical mass being achieved before a norm can produce noticeable consequences for others in the neighborhood.
  • Social networks: Individuals may be influenced by the interpersonal communication of information and resources of various kinds transmitted through neighbors. These networks can involve either “strong ties” and/or “weak ties.”
  • Social cohesion and control: The degree of neighborhood social disorder and its converse, “collective efficacy" may influence a variety of behaviors and psychological reactions of residents.
  • Relative deprivation: This mechanism suggests that residents who have achieved some socioeconomic success will be a source of disamenities for their less-well off neighbors. The latter, it is argued, will view the successful with envy and/or will make them perceive their own relative inferiority as a source of dissatisfaction.
  • Parental mediation: The neighborhood may affect (through any of the mechanisms listed under all categories here) parents’ physical and mental health, stress, coping skills, sense of efficacy, behaviors, and material resources. All of these, in turn, may affect the home environment in which children are raised.

Environmental effects

Environmental mechanisms refer to natural and human-made attributes of the local space that may affect directly the mental and/or physical health of residents without affecting their behaviors. As in the case of social-interactive mechanism, the environmental category can also assume distinct forms:

  • Exposure to violence: If people sense that their property or person is in danger they may suffer psychological and physical responses that may impair their functioning or sensed well-being. These consequences are likely to be even more pronounced if the person has been victimized.
  • Physical surroundings: Decayed physical conditions of the built environment (e.g., deteriorated structures and public infrastructure, litter, graffiti) may impart psychological effects on residents,

Geographical effects

Geographic mechanisms refer to aspects of spaces that may affect residents’ life courses yet do not arise within the neighborhood but rather purely because of the neighborhood's location relative to larger-scale political and economic forces such as:

  • Spatial mismatch: Certain neighborhoods may have little accessibility (in either spatial proximity or as mediated by transportation networks) to job opportunities appropriate to the skills of their residents, thereby restricting their employment opportunities.
  • Public services: Some neighborhoods may be located within local political jurisdictions that offer inferior public services and facilities because of their limited tax base resources, incompetence, corruption, or other operational challenges. These, in turn, may adversely affect the personal development and educational opportunities of residents.

Institutional effects

The last category of mechanisms involves actions by those typically not residing in the given neighborhood who control important institutional resources located there and/or points of interface between neighborhood residents and vital markets:

  • Stigmatization: Neighborhoods may be stigmatized on the basis of public stereotypes held by powerful institutional or private actors about its current residents. In other cases this may occur regardless of the neighborhood's current population because of its history, environmental or topographical disamenities, style, scale and type of dwellings, or condition of their commercial districts and public spaces. Such stigma may reduce the opportunities and perceptions of residents of stigmatized areas in a variety of ways, such as job opportunities and self-esteem.
  • Local institutional resources: Some neighborhoods may have access to few and/or high-quality private, non-profit, or public institutions and organizations, such as benevolent charities, day care facilities, schools, and medical clinics. The lack of same may adversely affect the personal development opportunities of residents.
  • Local market actors: There may be substantial spatial variations in the prevalence of certain private market actors that may encourage or discourage certain behaviors by neighborhood residents, such as liquor stores, fresh food markets, fast food restaurants, and illegal drug markets.

Regional examples

Concentrated poverty is a global phenomenon, with examples visible in both developed and developing countries. According to the Brookings Institution, post-industrial revolution growth has spread unevenly between and within countries, with many developing countries likely to still have regional examples of extreme poverty. [25] Through spatial analysis of satellite imagine, the Brookings Institution defined various "hotspots" of extreme poverty, primarily in areas of tropical Africa, tropical Latin America, Central- South Asia, and Southeast Asia/Western Oceania. Although this analysis does not refer specifically to concentrated poverty, rather more broadly to extreme poverty, its conclusions underscore the widespread nature of concentrated poverty, as well as its relationship to extreme poverty and poverty cycles. [25] Despite positive trends in the reduction of global poverty rates, researchers such as Oxford's Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina highlight the deepening divide between socioeconomic classes worldwide, which in turn paints an inaccurate image of the conditions faced by most populations. [26] [27] Instead, regions such as Africa and Asia observe overall economic growth while its poorest populations stagnate. [26] The widespread nature of extreme poverty, as well as trends pointing towards the growth of concentrated poverty, suggest a need to explore this issue through a more global lens. The following are examples of concentrated poverty through the lens of various countries/regions, ranging from developed to developing. While it is not an exhaustive list of examples, the overall goal is to provide information regarding the diverse characteristics of concentrated poverty.

1970–1990

The number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods – where the poverty rate was 40% or higher – doubled between 1970 and 1990. It was not until after the release of the 1980 census, however, that trends of poverty concentration were systematically studied, as the 1970 census was the first instance where the 40% measure was employed. Studying these trends, sociologist William Julius Wilson made the following discoveries regarding the decade of the 1970s:

  1. Poverty increased dramatically throughout metropolitan areas of the United States.
  2. The number of poor people residing within poor metropolitan areas increased
  3. The exacerbation of poverty conditions primarily occurred within African-American neighborhoods.
    Robert F. Wagner public housing in East Harlem, New York City. Wagner Houses.jpg
    Robert F. Wagner public housing in East Harlem, New York City.

Several other scholars later affirmed a dramatic increase in the number of neighborhoods classified as areas of concentrated poverty in the 1970s. [5] The increase of neighborhoods classified as areas of "extreme poverty" continued into the 1980s, albeit to a lesser extent. [28] The same trends of concentrated poverty observed at the census tract and neighborhood levels were similarly observed at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level. Both decades between 1970 and 1990 saw an increased difference in poverty rates between central cities and their suburbs, reflecting an increasing spatial concentration of MSA poverty within central cities. [8] The changing spatial distribution of poverty has been attributed to the following:

  • Changes in the labor market due to deindustrialization, leading to a widening wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers and spatial mismatches between the types of jobs offered in cities and the type of workers residing within them.
  • Declining economic growth (several studies, however, demonstrate a weak or non-existent link between poverty reduction and urban economic growth in neighborhoods with extreme poverty).
  • Relocation of upper- and middle- income residents from cities to suburbs, alongside demographic changes such as the rise in one-parent households and a decrease in labor market participation.

Such changes were intertwined with America's history of ethno-racial segregation. Some of its effects include white flight from American cities, leading to a declining tax base to provide city services, and the civil rights movement, allowing better-off blacks to leave inner-city areas. While concentrated poverty between 1970 and 1990 increased among blacks, Hispanics, and whites, the most dramatic increases were observed among blacks, followed by Hispanics, and to a much lesser extent whites. [7]

1990–2000

In the 1990s, the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods declined by 24%, or 2.5 million people. The steepest declines in high-poverty neighborhoods occurred in metropolitan areas in the Midwest and South, and the overall share of poor people living in high-poverty neighborhoods declined among all racial groups. The decline of the number of high-poverty neighborhoods occurred in rural areas and central cities, while suburbs experienced minimal change. [6] Scholars have also recognized qualitative shifts in areas of "concentrated poverty." A study of Southern California's (a state which observed increases in concentrated poverty during the 1990s despite national downward trends) metropolitan areas by Wolch and Sessoms draws attention to the contrast between growing inner-suburban poverty and the original intention of the concentrated poverty statistic. These areas, which qualify as "extreme poverty" under the 40% threshold, do not demonstrate the negative social behaviors or physical decay of traditional images that the original statistic was designed to designate. Other scholars argued for an expansion of the definition, challenging Jargowsky's claim of decreasing poverty concentration in the 1990s. Using the relative definition of poverty employed in Europe, based on 50% of the median income in each region, Swanstrom et al. point to an increase in concentrated poverty throughout most American cities during the 1990s. [29]

2000–present

Example of public housing in South Minneapolis, Minnesota. Horn Towers - South Minneapolis MPHA Public Housing Building, Minnesota (49155432256).jpg
Example of public housing in South Minneapolis, Minnesota.

From 2000 to 2009, the populations of extremely poor neighborhoods climbed by over one third, from 6.6 million to 8.7 million, erasing any progress claimed during the 1990s. [30] During that time, the share of poor people living in such neighborhoods grew from 9.1% to 10.5%, highlighting the "double burden" effect of their individual poverty and the poverty within their community. [30] A Brookings Institution report attributes this trend to both the downturn of 2000 and the 2008 recession. This poverty not only affected inner cities, but continued to spread into the suburbs, extending the suburbanization trend of concentrated poverty first noted in the 1990s. Furthermore, the study indicated that the concentrated poverty rates of 2010 was approaching an all-time high. In metro areas, concentrated poverty grew to 15.1%, a considerable increase from 11.7% between 2005 and 2009 and nearing the previous record of 16.5% from 1990. Such trend appears to confirm William Julius Wilson's original thesis, which states that extremely poor neighborhoods and their residents are the last to benefit from economic growth and the first to suffer from economic troubles.

Brazil

Favela neighborhood on the periphery of an urban area. Favela - panoramio.jpg
Favela neighborhood on the periphery of an urban area.

Despite its ranking as one of the largest economies in the world, Brazil continues facing deep socioeconomic inequality. According to a 2008 paper by Nathalie Beghin for Oxfam International employing data from the Institute for Applied Economic Research, 11.5% of its population was categorized as extremely poor, with an overall 30.3% (including the aforementioned 11.5%) classified as "poor." [31] Beghin further states that Brazil's poverty rate is in some cases more than three times higher than that of comparable economies. Such economic situation in turn confines poor people to areas with large spatial concentrations of poverty, such as the infamous Favelas, neighborhoods with few access to government services, high crime, and poor living conditions. According to a descriptive study by Brueckner et al. for the Journal of Housing Economics, significant rural to urban migration in the second half of the 1900s led to unprecedented metropolitan population growth. [32] Given the rapid influx of often-poor migrants, as well as insufficient housing, slums developed along the edges of cities. These neighborhoods did not follow building codes, lacking sanitation and other services. [32] Exhibiting similarities to examples of concentrated poverty in the United States, neighborhoods such as favelas have additionally struggled with racial and socioeconomic discrimination. [33] Working on Brazilian census data, the Brueckner et al. study underscores the racial disparity of favela residents, finding a statistically significantly greater chance of non-white residents existing within favelas than the rest of Brazilian urban areas. [32] Given their relative disconnect from government oversight, favelas are frequently depicted as breeding grounds for organized crime. A study for the Political and Legal Anthropology Review outlines criminal organizations' strategies for finding refuge within favelas, involving complex relationships with favela residents. [34] These organizations essentially act as a government for favelas, claiming to provide order, security, and resources. Within this study, however, such security is referred to as "ordered disorder," due to the continued threat of violence to residents brought forth by criminal activity. [34]

Turkey

Gecekondu neighborhood in Ankara, Turkey Old Ankara (6526102737).jpg
Gecekondu neighborhood in Ankara, Turkey

Similar to Brazil, Turkey experienced an explosive rate of urbanization throughout the 20th century, leading to various hasty attempts at expanding urban housing capacities. [35] Citing a variety of Turkish government sources, the Middle East Institute describes Istanbul, Turkey's largest city, as increasing its share of the total Turkish population from 5% in 1955 to at least 14% in 2000, with continued growth patterns. [36] Gecekondu refers to neighborhoods built through legally-questionable methods to house rural migrants within or outside urban centers. The primary demographic of gecekondu residents are rural poor seeking improved living conditions and urban employment. Research published in Turkey's Megaron journal by Bektaş & Yücel outline vast problems faced by the residents of gecekondus, relating primarily to their integration to urban life, as well as spatial distribution. [37] In essence, their study reveals the impact of continued rapid migration patterns and insufficient governmental responses on urban inequality. As more residents settle into urban centers, the concentration of poverty increases while resources become increasingly scarce. Gecekondu residents face additional hardships due to the questionable legality of their housing: as gecekondus are traditionally built through legal loopholes, avoiding costs associated with formal land use, residents may encounter a problematic relationship with government entities. In a paper for the journal Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, researcher Tahire Erman explores the relationship between gecekondu residents and government intervention, revealing the residents' decreasing bargaining power. Primarily, the demographic makeup of gecekondus have led to varying levels of government attention to different neighborhoods. As the years progressed and Turkish politics shifted toward neoliberalism, neighborhoods grew increasingly divided, with the largest ramifications being a loss of collective bargaining power. Consequently, residents are more vulnerable to displacement and face increasing governmental neglect. Overall, gecekondu neighborhoods stand as examples of the negative effects inherent to and generated by concentrated poverty, with residents facing poor living conditions and socioeconomic and political barriers to integration. [38]

Examples of policy interventions

United States

Beginning in the early 1990s, federal housing policy has focused on reducing the spatial concentration of poverty, accomplished through three methods:

  1. Creating income diversity within public housing developments that continue to be owned and operated by public housing authorities under the rules of the public housing program.
  2. Creating income diversity in new or redeveloped housing projects, including former public housing projects redeveloped under the HOPE VI program.
  3. Encouraging the use of tenant-based housing vouchers for families to locate in neighborhoods that will improve the life opportunities of family members.

Mobility programs

Authorized in 1992, the Moving To Opportunity (MTO) pilot program provided section 8 vouchers to public housing residents to enable them to move out of public housing and into neighborhoods with lower poverty. Modeled after Chicago's Gautreaux program, which provided housing vouchers to black public housing residents so they could move to more integrated neighborhoods, MTO stands as an example of "mobility programs" aimed at enabling poor families from high-poverty neighborhoods to move into communities featuring decreased poverty levels, such as middle-class neighborhoods.

Comparatively, the Gatreuax program exhibited stronger and clearer results than MTO. The program assigned participants selected from the same pool of callers to random private apartment placements in either suburban or urban locations. Follow-ups several years later revealed different outcomes between suburban and urban participants. Namely, urban participants were more likely to have remained on welfare rolls while their suburban counterparts were very likely to find employment and leave welfare programs. Additionally, children of urban participants were likely to drop out of high school while suburban participants were likely to graduate from high school and proceed towards college. The children of both types of participants began below the average academic level of their peers, however due to the lower number of participants selected for suburbs, suburban participants' children experience greater individual instruction. In turn, suburban children eventually reached the same level of academic proficiency as their average classmates.

On the other hand, participants of the MTO program experienced non-significant changes in employment and educational improvement, with nearly half of all participants moving back or remaining in their original neighborhood. Most participants did not move into suburbs, instead moving more frequently into other nearby urban neighborhoods with lower poverty levels. The program did show significant improvements regarding the fostering of a sense of security among participants, resulting in the reduction of stress, fear, and depression, particularly among women and young girls. [39]

Several scholars have questioned both the success and broader ability of such policy interventions as an adequate response to concentrated poverty. Goetz argues that voluntary programs like MTO and Gautreaux, though justifiable on other grounds, will not make a dent in concentrated poverty for two reasons:

  1. They primarily select families most likely to succeed in their new environments, essentially the "cream of the crop."
  2. They do not reach sufficient scales to noticeably affect overall settlement patterns. [40]

MTO, Gautreaux and other voluntary mobility programs can apply to only a subset of the poor by the political reality of destination communities. Low-poverty areas are not anxious to receive large numbers of poor, public housing families, and there will typically be political backlash if current residents feel that these families are being forced into their neighborhoods, and it was this type of resistance that ended the expansion of the program in 1995. Venkatesh and Celimi point out, dispersal programs incorrectly assume the poor can relocate as easily as the middle class does. In fact, very real resource constraints limit the ability of public housing families to abandon existing support networks, and these constraints limit the attractiveness of dispersal strategies to poor families. [41] Lastly, mobility programs have historically contributed to disadvantages for the current residents of neighborhoods where poor families have been relocated. [40]

Hope VI

Hope VI is a federal housing plan designed to revitalize American public housing projects into mixed-income developments. In most cases, such projects involve demolishing older high rise buildings composed entirely of extremely low-income residents and constructing higher quality, low-density, housing with various tiers of income earners. [42]

While Hope VI has successfully de-concentrated public housing sites, it has done little to de-concentrate poverty within poor neighborhoods in general. [43] Public housing families who are displaced and relocated typically re-concentrate in other poor neighborhoods nearby. Very rarely do these families relocate to low-poverty suburbs. Over half of families relocated by HOPE VI either move into other public housing or use vouchers to rent units on the private market. Public housing units are more likely to be in low-income neighborhoods. Families using vouchers are also likely to move into low-income areas, as they are more likely to find program-eligible units and landlords willing to rent to them. [40] Therefore, while HOPE VI has significantly improved the physical quality of several public housing sites and the lives of former residents given units in the new developments, it has come short of addressing the issue of concentrated poverty at large. [44]

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ghetto</span> Neighborhood inhabited by a minority group, usually when poor

A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, religious, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of such restricted areas have been found across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slum</span> Highly populated urban residential area consisting mostly of decrepit housing units

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Favela</span> Shanty town or slum in Brazil

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urban sociology</span> Sociological study of life and human interaction in metropolitan areas

Urban sociology is the sociological study of cities and urban life. One of the field’s oldest sub-disciplines, urban sociology studies and examines the social, historical, political, cultural, economic, and environmental forces that have shaped urban environments. Like most areas of sociology, urban sociologists use statistical analysis, observation, archival research, U.S. census data, social theory, interviews, and other methods to study a range of topics, including poverty, racial residential segregation, economic development, migration and demographic trends, gentrification, homelessness, blight and crime, urban decline, and neighborhood changes and revitalization. Urban sociological analysis provides critical insights that shape and guide urban planning and policy-making.

William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Underclass</span> Segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy

The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class.

Urban decay is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban decay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gecekondu</span> Turkish word for a house "built overnight"

Gecekondu is a Turkish word meaning a house put up quickly without proper permissions, a squatter's house, and by extension, a shanty or shack. Gecekondu bölgesi is a neighborhood made of those gecekondular. Gecekondu neighborhoods offer an affordable alternative for shelter for many low-income households who can not afford to purchase or rent formal housing.

Racial steering refers to the practice in which real estate brokers guide prospective home buyers towards or away from certain neighborhoods based on their race. The term is used in the context of de facto residential segregation in the United States, and is often divided into two broad classes of conduct:

  1. Advising customers to purchase homes in particular neighborhoods on the basis of race.
  2. Failing, on the basis of race, to show, or to inform buyers of homes that meet their specifications.
<span class="mw-page-title-main">Infill</span> Rededication of land in an urban environment to new construction

In urban planning, infill, or in-fill, is the rededication of land in an urban environment, usually open-space, to new construction. Infill also applies, within an urban polity, to construction on any undeveloped land that is not on the urban margin. The slightly broader term "land recycling" is sometimes used instead. Infill has been promoted as an economical use of existing infrastructure and a remedy for urban sprawl. Detractors view increased urban density as overloading urban services, including increased traffic congestion and pollution, and decreasing urban green-space. Many also dislike it for social and historical reasons, partly due to its unproven effects and its similarity with gentrification.

Spatial inequality refers to the unequal distribution of income and resources across geographical regions. Attributable to local differences in infrastructure, geographical features and economies of agglomeration, such inequality remains central to public policy discussions regarding economic inequality more broadly.

Economic restructuring is used to indicate changes in the constituent parts of an economy in a very general sense. In the western world, it is usually used to refer to the phenomenon of urban areas shifting from a manufacturing to a service sector economic base. It has profound implications for productive capacities and competitiveness of cities and regions. This transformation has affected demographics including income distribution, employment, and social hierarchy; institutional arrangements including the growth of the corporate complex, specialized producer services, capital mobility, informal economy, nonstandard work, and public outlays; as well as geographic spacing including the rise of world cities, spatial mismatch, and metropolitan growth differentials.

Residential segregation is the physical separation of two or more groups into different neighborhoods—a form of segregation that "sorts population groups into various neighborhood contexts and shapes the living environment at the neighborhood level". While it has traditionally been associated with racial segregation, it generally refers to the separation of populations based on some criteria.

In the United States, housing segregation is the practice of denying African Americans and other minority groups equal access to housing through the process of misinformation, denial of realty and financing services, and racial steering. Housing policy in the United States has influenced housing segregation trends throughout history. Key legislation include the National Housing Act of 1934, the G.I. Bill, and the Fair Housing Act. Factors such as socioeconomic status, spatial assimilation, and immigration contribute to perpetuating housing segregation. The effects of housing segregation include relocation, unequal living standards, and poverty. However, there have been initiatives to combat housing segregation, such as the Section 8 housing program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Subsidized housing in the United States</span> Rental assistance for low-income households

In the United States, subsidized housing is administered by federal, state and local agencies to provide subsidized rental assistance for low-income households. Public housing is priced much below the market rate, allowing people to live in more convenient locations rather than move away from the city in search of lower rents. In most federally-funded rental assistance programs, the tenants' monthly rent is set at 30% of their household income. Now increasingly provided in a variety of settings and formats, originally public housing in the U.S. consisted primarily of one or more concentrated blocks of low-rise and/or high-rise apartment buildings. These complexes are operated by state and local housing authorities which are authorized and funded by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In 2020, there were one million public housing units. In 2022, about 5.2 million American households that received some form of federal rental assistance.

Housing discrimination in the United States refers to the historical and current barriers, policies, and biases that prevent equitable access to housing. Housing discrimination became more pronounced after the abolition of slavery in 1865, typically as part of Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. The federal government didn't begin to take action against these laws until 1917, when the Supreme Court struck down ordinances prohibiting blacks from occupying or owning buildings in majority-white neighborhoods in Buchanan v. Warley. However, the federal government as well as local governments continued to be directly responsible for housing discrimination through redlining and race-restricted covenants until the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

Housing quality and health outcomes in the United States are inextricably linked. As a matter of U.S. public health, substandard housing is associated with outcomes such as injury, respiratory infections, heavy metal poisoning and asthma. It may also be associated with mental disability and with obesity and its related morbidities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mixed-income housing</span>

The definition of mixed-income housing is broad and encompasses many types of dwellings and neighborhoods. Following Brophy and Smith, the following will discuss “non-organic” examples of mixed-income housing, meaning “a deliberate effort to construct and/or own a multifamily development that has the mixing of income groups as a fundamental part of its financial and operating plans” A new, constructed mixed-income housing development includes diverse types of housing units, such as apartments, town homes, and/or single-family homes for people with a range of income levels. Mixed-income housing may include housing that is priced based on the dominant housing market with only a few units priced for lower-income residents, or it may not include any market-rate units and be built exclusively for low- and moderate-income residents. Calculating Area Median Income (AMI) and pricing units at certain percentages of AMI most often determine the income mix of a mixed-income housing development. Mixed-income housing is one of two primary mechanisms to eliminate neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, combat residential segregation, and avoid the building of public housing that offers 100% of its housing units to those living in poverty. Mixed-income housing is built through federal-, state-, and local-level efforts and through a combination of public-private-non-profit partnerships.

Gentrification, the process of altering the demographic composition of a neighborhood usually by decreasing the percentage of low-income minority residents and increasing the percentage of typically white, higher-income residents, has been an issue between the residents of minority neighborhoods in Chicago who believe the influx of new residents destabilizes their communities, and the gentrifiers who see it as a process that economically improves a neighborhood. Researchers have debated the significance of its effects on the neighborhoods and whether or not it leads to the displacement of residents. There are some researchers who claim that the loss of affordable housing mainly impacts the poorer minority residents and causes them to have to move out of their neighborhoods which destabilizes their cultural communities. However, critics say that since gentrification often excludes highly black neighborhoods, those residents are prevented from benefiting from any of the positive effects such as redevelopment and neighborhood investment. Factors associated with and used to measure gentrification in Chicago are changes in the number of residents with bachelor's degrees, median household income, racial composition, visual observations, and the presence of coffee shops. Historically, the emergence of urban black and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago during the 1950s through the 1970s were made possible because of the waves of white residents moving out into more suburban neighborhoods. There have been phases of gentrification in Chicago of various neighborhoods, some of which were in 1990s and in 2007–2009. Gentrification debates in Chicago have been mostly focused around the gentrification of Chicago's historically Latino or black neighborhoods. Generally, these neighborhoods are located near the central urban downtown areas and along the east side of the city.

References

  1. ↑ Shapiro I, Murray C, Sard B. “Basic facts on concentrated poverty.” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2015. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/11-3-15hous2.pdf .
  2. ↑ Bureau of the Census. 1970. “Low-Income Areas in Large Cities”. Subject Report. U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington D.C.
  3. ↑ Kharas, Jennifer L. Cohen, Raj M. Desai, and Homi (2019-09-24). "The geography of poverty hotspots". Brookings. Retrieved 2020-03-02.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ McClure, Kirk (2008-01-31). "Deconcentrating Poverty With Housing Programs". Journal of the American Planning Association. 74 (1): 90–99. doi:10.1080/01944360701730165. ISSN   0194-4363. S2CID   154744528.
  5. 1 2 Jargowsky, Paul A. 1997. Poverty and place: Ghettos, barrios, and the American city. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
  6. 1 2 Jargowsky, Paul A. Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s. Living Cities Census Series, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Studies. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, May 2003.
  7. 1 2 3 Wilson, W. 1987: The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
  8. 1 2 Madden, J. 1996. “Changes in the Distribution of Poverty Across and Within the U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1979–1989”. Urban Studies 33,9:1581–1600.
  9. ↑ Jargowsky, P. and Bane, M. 1991. “Ghetto Poverty in the United States, 1970 to 1980”. in The Urban Underclass edited by Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
  10. ↑ Bol, Manute. and Eggers, M. 1990. “The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty, 1970–1980”. American Journal of Sociology 95(5): 1156. cited in Wolch, Jennifer and Nathan Sessoms."The Changing Face of Concentrated Poverty."
  11. ↑ Wolch, Jennifer and Nathan Sessoms."The Changing Face of Concentrated Poverty." http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/lusk/research/pdf/wp_2005-1004.pdf Archived 2011-05-26 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ↑ Sanchez-Jankowski, M. 2008. Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  13. ↑ Wacquant, L. 2011. “A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto.” Pp. 1–31 in Ray Hutchison and Bruce Haynes (eds.), The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies, Boulder, Westview, 201.
  14. ↑ Massey, D., and Nancy Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
  15. ↑ Lewis, O. 1959. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books.
  16. ↑ Agnew J, 1993, "Representing space, scale and culture in social science", in Place/Culture/ Representation Eds J Duncan, D Ley (Routledge, New York) pp 251–271
  17. ↑ Steinberg, S. (2010). The Myth of Concentrated Poverty. In The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities. Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires, eds. Pp.228–301. New York: Routledge.
  18. ↑ Goetz, E. (2003). Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press
  19. ↑ "Children in single-parent families by race | KIDS COUNT Data Center".
  20. ↑ "Evidence Matters: Understanding Neighborhood Effects of Concentrated Poverty | HUD USER".
  21. 1 2 George C. Galster, “The Mechanism(s) of Neighborhood Effects: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications.” Presentation at the ESRC Seminar, St. Andrews University, Scotland, UK, 4–5 February 2010.
  22. ↑ “The Costs of Concentrated Poverty: Neighborhood Property Markets and the Dynamics of Decline.” In Nicolas P. Retsinas and Eric S. Belsky, eds., Revisiting Rental Housing: Policies, Programs, and Priorities. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 116–9.
  23. ↑ Sharkey, Patrick (2009, July) “Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap,” Washington, DC: The Economic Mobility Project, The Pew Charitable Trusts.
  24. ↑ Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley. 2002. “Assessing ‘Neighborhood Effects’: Social Processes and New Directions in Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 28: 466.
  25. 1 2 Kharas, Jennifer L. Cohen, Raj M. Desai, and Homi (2019-09-24). "The geography of poverty hotspots". Brookings. Retrieved 2020-03-02.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  26. 1 2 Agder, Alf Gunvald Nilsen, University of (18 October 2018). "World Bank's optimism about declining global poverty is missing a crucial point". Quartz Africa. Retrieved 2020-03-03.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  27. ↑ Roser, Max; Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban (2013-05-25). "Global Extreme Poverty". Our World in Data.
  28. ↑ Mincy, Ronald B., and Susan J. Wiener. 1993. The underclass in the 1980s: Changing concepts, constant reality. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.
  29. ↑ Swanstrom, Todd; Rob Ryan; & Katherine M. Stigers. (2007). Measuring Concentrated Poverty: Did It Really Decline in the 1990s?. UC Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2qm2s1vq.
  30. 1 2 Kneebone, E. et al. (2011) “The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s." Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 116–9.http://www.brookings.edu/topics/concentrated-poverty.aspx
  31. ↑ Beghin, Nathalie. “Notes on Inequality and Poverty in Brazil: Current Situation and Challenges .” Oxfam International, 2008, doi:https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/112516/fp2p-bp-notes-inequality-poverty-brazil-current-140608-en.pdf .
  32. 1 2 3 Brueckner, Jan K.; Mation, Lucas; Nadalin, Vanessa G. (2019-06-01). "Slums in Brazil: Where are they located, who lives in them, and do they 'squeeze' the formal housing market?". Journal of Housing Economics. 44: 48–60. doi:10.1016/j.jhe.2019.02.003. ISSN   1051-1377. S2CID   159265284.
  33. ↑ Figueiredo, Gustavo de Oliveira (2017-07-01). "Un análisis histórico-crítico del fenómeno de las favelas en Rio de Janeiro/Brasil". Jangwa Pana (in Spanish): 235–249. doi: 10.21676/16574923.2131 . ISSN   2389-7872.
  34. 1 2 Penglase, Ben (2009). "States of Insecurity: Everyday Emergencies, Public Secrets, and Drug Trafficker Power in a Brazilian Favela". PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 32 (1): 47–63. doi:10.1111/j.1555-2934.2009.01023.x. ISSN   1555-2934.
  35. ↑ Erman, Tahire (2011). "Understanding The Experiences Of The Politics Of Urbanization In Two Gecekondu (Squatter) Neighborhoods Under Two Urban Regimes: Ethnography In The Urban Periphery Of Ankara, Turkey". Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development. 40 (1/2): 67–108. ISSN   0894-6019. JSTOR   41291338.
  36. ↑ "Sold Overnight: Istanbul's Gecekondu Housing and the Challenge of Ownership". Middle East Institute. Retrieved 2020-04-21.
  37. ↑ Bektas, Yasin; Yucel, Ceyhan (2013). "Research Regarding Observation of Spatial Segregation in Ankara-Altındağ Hill Squatter Region" (PDF). MEGARON / Yıldız Technical University, Faculty of Architecture e-Journal. 8 (2): 115–129. doi: 10.5505/megaron.2013.98608 . ISSN   1309-6915.
  38. ↑ Uzun, Bayram; Çete, Mehmet; Palancıoğlu, H. Mustafa (April 2010). "Legalizing and upgrading illegal settlements in Turkey". Habitat International. 34 (2): 204–209. doi:10.1016/j.habitatint.2009.09.004. ISSN   0197-3975.
  39. ↑ Briggs, Xavier de Souza, Susan J. Popkin, and John Goering. 2010. Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty. Oxford University Press, USA, March 31
  40. 1 2 3 "The Reality of Deconcentration". November 2004.
  41. ↑ "Tearing Down the Community: Chicago Public Housing". November 2004.
  42. ↑ "About HOPE VI – Public and Indian Housing – HUD". Archived from the original on 2012-04-14. Retrieved 2019-07-08.
  43. ↑ Goetz, Edward G. 2003. Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America. Urban Inst Pr, May.
  44. ↑ "A Decade of HOPE VI". 4 June 2016.
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