Gentrification is the process of change in the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and investment. There is no agreed-upon definition of gentrification. In public discourse, it has been used to describe a wide array of phenomena, sometimes in a pejorative connotation.
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group are concentrated, 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.
A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are primarily inhabited by impoverished people. Although slums are usually located in urban areas, in some countries they can be located in suburban areas where housing quality is low and living conditions are poor. While slums differ in size and other characteristics, most lack reliable sanitation services, supply of clean water, reliable electricity, law enforcement, and other basic services. Slum residences vary from shanty houses to professionally built dwellings which, because of poor-quality construction or lack of basic maintenance, have deteriorated.
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, 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.
Spatial mismatch is the mismatch between where low-income households reside and suitable job opportunities. In its original formulation and in subsequent research, it has mostly been understood as a phenomenon affecting African-Americans, as a result of residential segregation, economic restructuring, and the suburbanization of employment.
The Chicago school refers to a school of thought in sociology and criminology originating at the University of Chicago whose work was influential in the early 20th century.
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. This group is usually considered cut off from the rest of the society.
Loïc J. D. Wacquant is a French sociologist specializing in urban sociology, urban poverty, racial inequality, the body, social theory and ethnography.
Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation have been systematically separated in the United States based on racial categorizations. Segregation was the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, as well as the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority and mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, and the separation of roles within an institution. The U.S. Armed Forces were formally segregated until 1948, as black units were separated from white units but were still typically led by white officers.
African-American neighborhoods or black neighborhoods are types of ethnic enclaves found in many cities in the United States. Generally, an African American neighborhood is one where the majority of the people who live there are African American. Some of the earliest African-American neighborhoods were in New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta, and other cities throughout the American South, as well as in New York City. In 1830, there were 14,000 "Free negroes" living in New York City.
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.
There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America by William Julius Wilson and Richard Taub was written in 2006 and is an investigation about racial, ethnic and class tensions in four Chicago neighborhoods. The four neighborhoods, Beltway, Dover, Archer Park, and Groveland are found on the South Side and West Side of Chicago. Beltway was chosen as being the white neighborhood, Dover as being the white neighborhood in transition, Archer Park as being the Latino neighborhood, and Groveland as being the African-American neighborhood.
Welfare dependency is the state in which a person or household is reliant on government welfare benefits for their income for a prolonged period of time, and without which they would not be able to meet the expenses of daily living. The United States Department of Health and Human Services defines welfare dependency as the proportion of all individuals in families which receive more than 50 percent of their total annual income from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and/or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Typically viewed as a social problem, it has been the subject of major welfare reform efforts since the mid-20th century, primarily focused on trying to make recipients self-sufficient through paid work. While the term "welfare dependency" can be used pejoratively, for the purposes of this article it shall be used to indicate a particular situation of persistent poverty.
Concentrated poverty concerns the spatial distribution of socio-economic deprivation, specifically focusing on the density of poor populations. 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." 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. 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.
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.
Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race, and Poverty in the United States is a 30-year update of the final report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, co-authored by former Kerner Commissioner, Senator and Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation Chairman Fred R. Harris and Eisenhower Foundation President Alan Curtis. The book was released in 1998 with a companion volume, The Millennium Breach.
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy is a book by William Julius Wilson. The book was first published in 1987; a second edition was published in 2012. It examines the relationship between race and poverty in the United States, and the history of American inner-city ghettos. The broad-ranging book rejects both conservative and liberal arguments for the social conditions in American inner cities. In it, Wilson argues that the decline of such conditions is due to "basic economic changes which radically altered the occupational structure of the central cities," such as the withdrawal of large industries from inner cities during the 1970s. He also criticizes the architects of the War on Poverty during the 1960s, saying that they focused too much on poverty as a problem of environment rather than as a problem of "economic organization".
Ghettos in the United States are typically urban neighborhoods perceived as being high in crime and poverty. The origins of these areas are specific to the United States and its laws, which created ghettos through both legislation and private efforts to segregate America for political, economic, social, and ideological reasons: de jure and de facto segregation. De facto segregation continues today in ways such as residential segregation and school segregation because of contemporary behavior and the historical legacy of de jure segregation.
John Forrest Kain was an American empirical economist and college professor. He is notable for first hypothesising spatial mismatch theory, whereby he argued that there are insufficient job opportunities in low-income household areas. Kain is also notable for his focus on transport economics, for his long career of teaching at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as for founding the Texas Schools Project.
