GEOGRAPHIC CONTEXT AND CONCENTRATED URBAN POVERTY WITHIN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

Responding to previous analyses that assume that places are passive recipients of the various macro-level social phenomena associated with concentrated urban poverty, I hypothesize that concentrated urban poverty takes on different forms in different places as a result of how macro-level social phenomena are mediated by locally specific structures. To investigate how concentrated urban poverty takes on different forms in different places, I first decompose the poverty rates of all high-poverty urban neighborhoods in the United States into their race-specific rate and composition effects, and classify high-poverty neighborhoods based on these decomposition values. The results of the analysis demonstrate that poverty in a majority of the high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States is undoubtedly affected by geographically specific processes. For example, within one set of high-poverty neighborhoods, poverty is associated with both the lack of economic opportunity and high rates of class-based residential segregation within mixed-race immigrant ethnic/immigrant enclaves in large gateway cities. A second set of high-poverty neighborhoods, located in the metropolitan areas of the southern United States, has high rates of poverty because of the residential segregation and geographic concentration of poverty-prone African Americans. And lastly, among a third set of tracts, poverty experiences in African American ghettos are linked to declining economic and social opportunities and class-based residential segregation within large manufacturing cities. A set of recommendations for additional research includes addressing how one-size-fits-all anti-poverty public policies should be modified for the specific needs of each type of high-poverty neighborhood. [Key words: context, poverty, segregation, employment, race, ethnicity.]