The Spatial Concentration of Subsidized Housing - Poverty & Race ...

limited the study to city vs. suburbs. In 1977, 71% of all public housing units inMSA’s were located in the central cities. This number had increased to only 74% by1992.Massey and Kanaiaupuni (1993) found that poverty increased in all Chicagoneighborhoods but the largest increases were in predominantly black neighborhoods.Due to the high rate of racial segregation in the Chicago MSA in 1970, most blackslived in tracts that were 90 percent black and were relatively more likely to live intracts with public housing compared to whites. Poverty was an average of 16 percentin the absence of public housing to 26 percent in neighborhoods with public housing(p. 118). The authors conclude that public housing caused concentrated povertythrough three processes: 1) concentrating poor families by virtue of the public housingincome restrictions; 2) the continuing effects over time of earlier public housingconstruction; and 3) an indirect effect on migration rates (p. 118). A study by Schilland Wachter (1995) confirmed these results in the City of Philadelphia. Massey andKanaiaupuni (1993) sum up their findings, “Public housing thus represents a keyinstitutional mechanism for concentrating large numbers of poor people within a smallgeographic space, often within dense, high-rise buildings. Because low-incomeprojects were systematically targeted to black neighborhoods in a discriminatoryfashion (Hirsch, 1983; Goldstein and Yancey, 1986; Bauman, 1987), this institutionalmechanism greatly exacerbated the degree of poverty concentration for one group inparticular – blacks” (Massey and Kanaiaupuni, 1993, p. 120).13