Concentrated poverty
[1] Within the United States, common usage of the term concentrated poverty is observed in the fields of policy and scholarship referencing areas of "extreme" or "high-poverty."
[4] A long-standing issue, concentrated poverty creates distinct social problems, exacerbating individual impoverishment and standing as the grounds of reform movements and studies since the mid-19th century.
An analytical conception and measure for concentrated emerged in the United States around the 1970s, sparked by concern for its inner cities following deindustrialization, late-1960s civil unrest, rapid suburbanization, and subsequent out-migration.
An attribute-based criterion formed the original definition, with census tracts ranked by the following: Of these, the lowest quartile were designated "low income."
His rate expresses the proportion of all poor individuals in a certain area (e.g., city, metropolitan region, or county) who live in census tracts of high poverty.
[6] William Julius Wilson's book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy was the first major scholarly work utilizing the census measure to study changing spatial trends in poverty, as well as its causes and effects.
[7] According to his findings, tracts of concentrated poverty increased dramatically throughout metropolitan areas of the United States during the 1970s, alongside the population of poor people residing within them.
Its standardization is largely credited to the measure's convenience, as opposed to any conceptual justifications, and is employed to compare degrees of poverty concentration between areas, as well as the growth or decline in total number of tracts fitting such qualifications within a given city, region, or country.
The overall discussion for both cases has labeled the use of bureaucratic categories intended to facilitate both the routine collection of statistics and public assistance eligibility as unfit for comprehensively capturing urban social structures and strategies.
Many criticisms revolve around the poverty threshold, the most prominent including the inability to fully consider the needs of different family types (e.g.: childcare services, health insurance, etc.
[8] Concurrently, the 40% benchmark used by the census and various scholars to define concentrated poverty does not refer to any adequately specific objective or subjective criteria.
Systematic field observations in various inner-city areas reveal that census tracts serve as poor proxies of what residents construe and construct as neighborhoods in their daily routines.
[12] Sociologist Loic Wacquant criticized the measure when used to denote or define “ghettos," a reference first made by Bane and Jargowsky and William Julius Wilson (see above).
According to Wacquant, this income-based notion of the ghetto is "ostensibly deracialized" and largely a product of policy-geared research fearful of the "strict taboo that weighs on segregation in the political sphere".
[14] Additional questions by Wacquant include why rural communities and suburban tracts are often left out of social science analyses focusing on concentrated poverty.
He termed the primary effect "social isolation", defined as the lack of contact or sustained interaction with individuals and institutions representing mainstream society.
A key in Wilson's idea of social isolation is the linking of behavioral outcomes of the ghetto poor to the structural constraints of the job market and historical discrimination.
According to William Julius Wilson in the 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy, the driving forces of American concentrated poverty date back to the 1970s.
These studies indicate that neighborhood characteristics, particularly the concentration of poverty, affect crime and delinquency, education deficiencies, psychological distress, and various health problems, among many other issues.
While initial research failed to isolate the direct effects of "concentrated poverty" itself, more recent work has shifted to identifying its primary mechanisms.
[25] Despite positive trends in the reduction of global poverty rates, researchers such as Oxford's Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina highlight the deepening divide between socioeconomic classes worldwide, which in turn paints an inaccurate image of the conditions faced by most populations.
Studying these trends, sociologist William Julius Wilson made the following discoveries regarding the decade of the 1970s: Several other scholars later affirmed a dramatic increase in the number of neighborhoods classified as areas of concentrated poverty in the 1970s.
According to a descriptive study by Brueckner et al. for the Journal of Housing Economics, significant rural to urban migration in the second half of the 1900s led to unprecedented metropolitan population growth.
[32] Exhibiting similarities to examples of concentrated poverty in the United States, neighborhoods such as favelas have additionally struggled with racial and socioeconomic discrimination.
Research published in Turkey's Megaron journal by Bektaş & Yücel outline vast problems faced by the residents of gecekondus, relating primarily to their integration to urban life, as well as spatial distribution.
As the years progressed and Turkish politics shifted toward neoliberalism, neighborhoods grew increasingly divided, with the largest ramifications being a loss of collective bargaining power.
Overall, gecekondu neighborhoods stand as examples of the negative effects inherent to and generated by concentrated poverty, with residents facing poor living conditions and socioeconomic and political barriers to integration.
The program did show significant improvements regarding the fostering of a sense of security among participants, resulting in the reduction of stress, fear, and depression, particularly among women and young girls.
In most cases, such projects involve demolishing older high rise buildings composed entirely of extremely low-income residents and constructing higher quality, low-density, housing with various tiers of income earners.
[40] Therefore, while HOPE VI has significantly improved the physical quality of several public housing sites and the lives of former residents given units in the new developments, it has come short of addressing the issue of concentrated poverty at large.
