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

hardship; and 2) public housing weakening the neighborhood housing market. The“propensity of the population to fall into poverty” explained a significant amount ofthe change in poverty over a decade. Distance from the subsidized housing also had astrong effect. Public housing had an effect on blacks that was double that of whites (p.12). Older public housing concentrated more than more recent construction, but allwere found to concentrate poverty (p. 779). Since this study was confined to only oneMSA the results cannot be generalized.Rosenthal (2008) studied the impact of subsidized housing on concentration ofpoverty in 270 MSA’s nationwide with data from 1970 to 2000 as well as apreliminary study of 35 MSA’s and case study of Philadelphia (Rosenthal, 2007). Thestudy includes two site-based subsidized housing programs (public housing andLIHTC) in the multivariate analysis as potential predictors of change in neighborhoodpoverty. The study found the persistence of low- poverty and very high poverty censustracts over a thirty year period from 1970 to 2000 (p. 65). The author identifiedmultiple processes leading to concentrated poverty including 1) aging housing stock;2) access to public transit; 3) Socio-economic status (SES) spillover effects (defined aspoverty attracting more poverty and the effect of racial segregation on povertyconcentration); and 4) the location of site based subsidized housing. All fourprocesses contribute to the total result. Public housing and the LIHTC were bothfound to increase the poverty rate in the subsequent decade. Also, high densityhousing was found to consistently increase the poverty rate (p. 85). “While MSA-wide17