Dealing with living in poor neighbourhoods

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In this prologue to the special issue, the guest editors place the contributions in the context of current debates on living in concentrated poverty neighbourhoods. These debates concern two broad categories of residents: poor households that are assisted to move from concentrations of poverty to lower-poverty areas (movers); and households (not exclusively the poor) that cannot move out of poor neighbourhoods or are not willing to do so, for various reasons (stayers). For the first category, the main issue is whether housing vouchers provide movers only with better housing or also with other social, psychological and economic benefits. A wealth of (partly contradictory) evidence justifies exploring a fundamental question: What should housing vouchers do? With regard to those unwilling or unable to move out of poor neighbourhoods, we focus on how residents cope with the recurrent problems and stressful circumstances in poor neighbourhoods. Here, four interrelated concepts are central to our discussion: place attachment, coping tactics, territoriality, and social network formation. Our discussion paves the way for the subsequent five papers, each dealing with one of the selected topics. The aim of this special issue is to provide new evidence that underpins or questions the current debates on living in or leaving neighbourhoods with concentrated poverty. The research reported here was done in the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands.