Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000

Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s

For many years the conditions of life in the poorest of poor neighborhoods have attracted the attention of filmmakers, journalists, and academic researchers. Each of these witnesses, in his or her own way, has provided stark evidence of the devastating effects impoverished environments can have on those unfortunate enough to dwell within them, and of how these effects spill over into society at large. Poverty, in government statistics, is defined by a family’s income relative to a standard meant to reflect the cost of basic necessities (the “poverty line”). This narrow conception of poverty, however, fails to capture the multiple ways in which poverty degrades the quality of life and limits the opportunities of those in its grip. One of the most important aspects of poverty not captured in the official statistics is its spatial dimension. In theory poor families and their children could be widely dispersed throughout the population . In fact they tend to live near other poor people in neighborhoods with high poverty rates. The problem is particularly acute for the minority poor, who are segregated by both race and income. Why should we be concerned with the spatial organization of poverty? The concentration of poor families and children in high-poverty ghettos, barrios, 137 Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s P A U L A . J A R G O W S K Y 5 The author thanks J. D. Kim, Sonia Monga, and Karl Ho for research assistance and technical support. He also acknowledges participants in the Social Science Workshop at the University of Texas at Dallas, including Brian Berry, Don Hicks, and Dan O’Brien and others who asked questions and made helpful suggestions at an early stage of this research. Also helpful were reviewers from the Brookings Institution. and slums magnifies the problems faced by the poor. Concentrations of poor people lead to a concentration of the social ills that cause or are caused by poverty. Poor children in these neighborhoods not only lack basic necessities in their own homes, but also they must contend with a hostile environment that holds many temptations and few positive role models. Equally important , school districts and attendance zones are generally organized geographically , so that the residential concentration of the poor frequently results in low-performing schools. The concentration of poverty in central cities also may exacerbate the flight of middle-income and higher-income families to the suburbs, driving a wedge between social needs and the fiscal base required to address them. Between 1970 and 1990, the spatial concentration of the poor rose dramatically in many U.S. metropolitan areas.1 The number of people living in high-poverty areas doubled; the chance that a poor black child resided in a high-poverty neighborhood increased from roughly one-in-four to one-inthree ; and the physical size of the blighted sections of many central cities increased even more dramatically. By contrast, poverty—measured at the family level—did not increase during this period. Thus there was not a change in poverty per se, but a fundamental change in the spatial organization of poverty. The poor became more physically isolated from the social and economic mainstream of society. Two important factors contributed to the increasing concentration of poverty during the 1970s and 1980s. First, weaknesses in local or regional economies tended to disproportionately affect central cities. Second, exclusionary suburban development patterns contributed to increasing economic segregation. Policymakers have been anxious to know how the spatial organization of poverty may have changed in the 1990s. For most metropolitan areas and the country as a whole, the decade was a period of unparalleled economic growth. Rapid suburban development continued, however, and perhaps even accelerated during this period. The net effect of these trends on the concentration of poverty in the 1990s is therefore ambiguous. Only the decennial census provides sufficient detail at the neighborhood level to examine the concentration of poverty. With the release of Census 2000, we are now able to assess the net impact of the economy, suburban development, and other forces on the spatial dimension of poverty over the last decade. 138 Paul A. Jargowsky 1. For a thorough discussion of the trends in concentrated poverty between 1970 and 1990, see Jargowsky (1997), especially chapter 2. Based on the trend of prior decades, one might have reasonably assumed that high-poverty neighborhoods...