Concentrated Poverty

from the city to the suburbs, and
demographic changes (the rise in oneparent
households and decrease in
labor market participation). These
changes were intertwined
with America's history of ethno-racial
segregation that produced the ghetto,
white flight from American cities, which
led to a declining tax base to provide
city services, and the civil rights
movement, which allowed better-off
blacks to leave inner-city areas.
Although concentrated poverty
increased among blacks, Hispanics, and
whites throughout 1970-1990s,
increases were far more dramatic
among blacks, followed by Hispanics,
and then to a much lesser extent whites.
1990-2000
The number of people living in highpoverty
neighborhoods declined by 24%
or 2.5 million people, in the 1990s. The
steepest declines in high-poverty
neighborhoods occurred in metropolitan
areas in the Midwest and South. The
share of the poor living in high-poverty
neighborhoods declined among all racial
and ethnic groups. This was especially
the case for African Americans, wherein
the share of poor black individuals living
in high-poverty neighborhoods declined
from 30 percent in 1990 to 19 percent in
2000. This decline of high-poverty
neighborhoods occurred in rural areas
and central cities, but suburbs
experienced almost no change.
Scholars have also recognized
qualitative shifts in areas of
"concentrated poverty." In a study of
Southern California metropolitan areas
(a state which did see rises in
concentrated poverty through the '90s
against the national trend), Wolch and
Sessoms point to the growing number of
working poor populations and the
emergence of inner-suburban poverty
which qualify as areas of "extreme
poverty" under the 40% threshold do not
demonstrate the same negative social
behaviors or physical decay of the
traditional image that the statistic was
first designed to designate. Other
scholars, have alternatively argued for
an expansion of the term and challenge
Jargowsky's claim of decreased poverty
concentration in the 1990s. Swanstrom
et al. have shown that by using the
relative definition of poverty as
employed in Europe based on 50% of
the median income in each region, the
'90s actually saw an increase in
concentrated poverty through most
American cities.
2000-Present
Whatever gains may have been made in
the reduction of concentrated poverty in
the '90s, it is clear that they did not
persist. Between 2000 and 2005–09, the
population in extremely poor
neighborhoods climbed by more than
one-third, from 6.6 million to 8.7 million.
The share of poor people living in these
sorts of neighborhoods, and thus
confronting the "double burden" of their
own poverty and the poverty of those
around them, grew from 9.1 percent to
10.5 percent during that
time. A Brookings
Institution
report attributes this trend to both the
downturn of 2000 and the 2008
recession. This poverty not only affected
inner cities, but continued to spread into
the suburbs, extending
the suburbanization trend
of
concentrated poverty first noted in the
1990s. Furthermore, the study found
that the concentrated poverty rate of
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