The Fortunes of Poor Neighborhoods (original) (raw)
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Migration Patterns and the Growth of High‐Poverty Neighborhoods, 1970‐1990
American Journal of Sociology, 1999
The proportion of the population residing in high-poverty urban areas grew in the 1970s and 1980s (Wilson 1987; Jargowsky 1997). This paper examines why the number of high-poverty neighborhoods increased by using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) matched with data on tracts from the decennial census. The main findings are that (1) African Americans are moving into white neighborhoods at a high rate, but the white population is declining in areas with substantial black populations quickly enough that the proportion black in white areas is not increasing and (2) there is no systematic tendency for poverty rates among stayers in poor neighborhoods to increase over time relative to poverty rates of other neighborhood types, although there is some evidence of a larger increase in the poverty rate of moderately poor black neighborhoods than other neighborhood types during the early 1980s recession. Implications of the findings for theories of high-poverty neighborhoods and racial segregation are discussed. Migration Patterns and the Growth of High-Poverty Neighborhoods, 1970-1990 William Wilson's book The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) first pointed out that starting in the 1970s areas of concentrated urban poverty increasingly took on a different character than they had earlier in the century. As in the ethnic ghettos that have long interested urban sociologists, dwellers in modern poor urban neighborhoods are almost all members of minority races or ethnicities. Wilson argues, however, that unlike older ethnic ghettos, poor neighborhoods of the 1970s and 1980s contained an especially high concentration of poor families. He hypothesizes that one cause of this trend is that middle-class blacks in the 1970s and 1980s increasingly relocated to predominantly white suburbs, leaving behind neighborhoods composed largely of poor or near-poor families. Wilson's work led empirical researchers to examine data to confirm or deny these suspicions. Investigations by Jargowsky (1994, 1997) have supported some of Wilson's hypotheses, finding that the proportion of the urban population living in census tracts in which at least 40 percent of the population is poor increased from 3 percent of the urban population in 1970 to 4.5 percent in 1990 (Jargowsky 1997, p. 38). Tests of Wilson's hypotheses about why this has occurred have been contradictory, and a considerable debate continues about why poor urban neighborhoods have expanded so sharply. An increase in the number of high-poverty urban neighborhoods can be thought of as resulting from a combination of two proximate causes: change in rates of poverty among urban residents and change in the tendency for persons of like poverty status to live close to each other. I decompose flows of persons among neighborhood and poverty status categories over time to examine how each of these proximate causes has influenced the number of high-poverty neighborhoods. This procedure sheds light on several explanations of the increase in neighborhood poverty. Along the way I consider evidence relevant to debates about the role of racial segregation in explaining concentrated urban poverty. I argue that studies of the role of racial segregation in forming high-poverty neighborhoods have not always clearly separated evidence about change over time from
Advances in Applied Sociology, 2014
This study introduces a framework to model moderate-to-high poverty transition in urban neighborhoods using their relative competitive positions within metropolitan areas. Relative competitive position is measured by a variety of neighborhood attributes, including resident and neighborhood characteristics, locational attributes, among others. The model was estimated using the decennial census, using tracts from 1990 and 2000 as proxies for neighborhoods. Results indicate that the competitive model works well as a method to evaluate neighborhood poverty transition. Neighborhoods with relatively unfavorable competitive positions within a metropolitan area experience more poverty growth and therefore are likely to have more concentrated poverty in the future. Based on the results, several recommendations are made to intervene. These include promoting public transit, immigrant assimilation programs, among others.
The Social Costs of Concentrated Poverty: Externalities to Neighboring Households and Property Owners and the Dynamics of Decline" We investigate theoretically and empirically two interrelated potential consequences of the spatial concentration of poverty: negative externalities to proximate residents (stimulation of socially harmful behaviors like crime) and property owners (reduced maintenance and, in the extreme, abandonment). Inasmuch as these consequences are capitalized into property values, we use changes in these values to make a rough estimate of the aggregate dollar costs to American society of the aforementioned externalities. We demonstrate the conceptual importance of threshold effects in the analysis of the potential costs of concentrated poverty to the society as a whole. We develop three theoretical models of the consequences of concentrated poverty: (1) micro-level, explaining how/why such would affect household behavior; (2) micro-level, explaining how/why such would affect property owner behavior; (3) meso-level, explaining how concentrated poverty, household behaviors and owner behaviors interrelate when aggregated to the neighborhood level in a mutually causal way. We specify and estimate two empirical models that show in reduced form the changes in property values and rents that transpire from changes in neighborhood poverty rates, both directly and indirectly through impacts on housing upkeep and crime. The first is a hedonic model of individual home sales in Cleveland from 1993-1997, and uses lagged annual observations of public assistance rates in the surrounding census tracts as a way of confronting the issue of simultaneity between values and poverty. The second models median values and rents in all census tracts in the largest 100 metropolitan areas from 1990-2000, and instruments for neighborhood poverty rates. Results from both models are remarkably similar, and show that there is no substantial relationship between neighborhood poverty changes and property values or rents when poverty rates stay below ten (10) percent. By contrast, marginal increases in poverty when neighborhood poverty rates are in the range of 10 to 20 percent results in dramatic declines in value and rent, strongly suggesting a threshold corresponding to the theoretical prediction. Using parameters from the second model, we simulate how property values and rents would have changed in the aggregate for our 100 largest metropolitan areas had populations been redistributed such that: (1) all census tracts in 1990 exceeding 20 percent poverty had their rate reduced to 20 percent by 2000, and (2) only the lowestpoverty tracts were allocated additional poor populations, with each increasing their poverty rate by five percentage points. We find in this thought experiment that owneroccupied property values would have risen 421billion(13421 billion (13%) and monthly rents would have risen 421billion(13400 million (4%) in aggregate, ceteris paribus.
Affluent Neighborhood Persistence and Change in U.S. Cities
City & Community, 2012
Places are stratified along a hierarchy, with the affluent occupying the most resource–rich neighborhoods. Affluent neighborhood advantages include safety, high quality schools, and proximity to jobs. An additional benefit may be local economic stability over time. In a national context of rising interpersonal income inequality since 1970 and of the Great Recession, trends in neighborhood persistence and change expose this spatial advantage of the affluent. Using census data from 1970 to 2010, I find increasing rates of stability in the affluence and poverty of neighborhoods through 2000, with declines during the last decade. I also find that rates of chronic poverty and persistent affluence are high, ranging between 30 and 35 percent of neighborhoods across the 40–year period. This study highlights the structural persistence of affluence and poverty of neighborhoods as a vehicle for perpetuating social inequality and economic segregation.
The Long-Run Consequences of Living in a Poor Neighborhood
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2003
Many social scientists presume that the quality of the neighborhood to which children are exposed affects a variety of long-run social outcomes. I examine the effect on long-run labor market outcomes of adults who were assigned, when young, to substantially different public housing projects in Toronto. Administrative data are matched to public housing addresses to track children from the program to when they are more than 30 years old. The main nding is that, while living conditions and exposure to crime differ substantially across projects, neighborhood quality plays little role in determining a youth's eventual earnings, unemployment likelihood, and welfare participation. Living in contrasting housing projects cannot explain large variances in labor market outcomes but family differences, as measured by sibling outcome correlations, account for up to 30 percent of the total variance in the data.
The Changing Intrametropolitan Location of High-poverty Neighbourhoods in the US, 1990-2000
Urban Studies, 2006
The purpose of this research is to explore the changing geographical distribution of high-poverty neighbourhoods both between and within American metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000. Of particular concern is the relative shift in the number of high-poverty neighbourhoods between central-city, inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs. A classification scheme is developed for identifying these three types of area. The results indicate that there has been an increase in the number of high-poverty neighbourhoods in the urban cores of economically stagnant old industrial cities of the Northeast and an increase in the number of high-poverty inner-ring neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, metropolitan areas in California's Central Valley and a few selected rapidly growing Sunbelt metropolitan areas. The analysis indicates that an increase in the number of urban core high-poverty neighbourhoods is linked to the general health of a metropolitan area's economy and that an increase in the numb...
A longitudinal analysis of urban poverty: Blacks in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 1980
Social Science Research, 1992
The prior analysis. however, was estimated using only cross-sectional data. The present longitudinal analysis finds little support for Murray's arguments and strong support for Wilson's. Results show that structural characteristics of the urban labor market-namely the suburbanization of employment, the decline in manufacturing jobs, and the rise of low-wage services-act to reduce black male employment, increase the prevalence of female-headed families, and drive up black poverty rates; but changes in the generosity of welfare payments have little or no effect on these outcomes. Discrepancies between the cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses are reconciled by considering the likely effects of selective migration between metropolitan areas. 0 1992 Academic Press. Inc. Long after the initiation of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," researchers and public policy analysts continue to debate the causes of urban poverty. Programs designed during the 1960s and 1970s to alleviate income deprivation and inequality had mixed results. Although far fewer elderly are below the poverty line now than in 1960, the vacancies they left behind were filled by women and children (
Metropolitan Growth and Economic Opportunity for the Poor: If You're Poor Does Place Matter?
2001
This paper focuses on why metropolitan areas vary in their capacity to translate generally high employment rates into economic opportunity for the disadvantaged. Data come from the Urban Institute's Urban Underclass Database, which includes poverty and employment data for 1980 and 1990 for the 100 largest metropolitan areas down to the Census tract level. Despite unprecedented economic growth since 1993, large segments of the population remain poor, and many cities have unacceptably high rates of poverty and economic disadvantage. The first section of this paper illustrates the wide divergence among metro areas along two dimensions: (1) the proportion of residents employed, compared with the proportion who are poor and (2) the relationship between 1980-90 employment change in a metro area and the 1980-90 change in that area's poverty rate. The second section uses multiple regression to distill the systematic influence of structural factors on the ability of a metro area to c...
Consequences From the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale
Economic Development Quarterly, 2005
Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the recent spatial redistribution of the urban poor does not necessarily bode well for the future. During the 1990s, the share of metropolitan population living in census tracts with high percentages (more than 40%) of poverty indeed fell significantly, but the shares with 10% to 20% and 20% to 40% poverty rates each rose 1 percentage point. These latter shifts are worrisome because many neighborhoods may have been pushed over their thresholds where poverty concentrations start to create significant external effects for neighbors.