Poverty Concentration Measures and the Urban Underclass

Abstract

The population in poverty in American cities has become confined to a subset of areas known as extreme poverty areas. These areas are the home of what has become known popularly as the urban underclass. Many definitions of the underclass are based on nonspatial measures of poverty concentration that do not adequately describe geographic confinement. A unique data set comprised of geographic coordinates attached to extreme poverty areas for 30 large American cities in 1970 and 1980 makes it possible to measure the changing spatial extent of poverty concentrations. Spatial statistics are used to derive descriptive measures of the changing size, form, and distribution of extreme poverty areas in different regional settings. Researchers have become increasingly interested in the effects of concentrated poverty in central city neighborhoods [3; 5;