Concentrated poverty

Concentrated poverty concerns the spatial distribution of socio-economic deprivation, specifically focusing on the density of poor populations. 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." These are defined by the US census as areas where "40 percent of the tract population below the federal poverty threshold." A large body of literature argues that areas of concentrated poverty place additional burdens on poor families residing within them, burdens beyond what these families' individual circumstances would dictate. Research also indicates that areas of concentrated poverty can have effects beyond the neighborhood in question, affecting surrounding neighborhoods not classified as "high-poverty" and subsequently limiting their overall economic potential and social cohesion. Concentrated poverty is a global phenomenon, with prominent examples world-wide. Despite differing definitions, contributing factors, and overall effects, global concentrated poverty retains its central theme of spatial density. Multiple programs have attempted to ameliorate concentrated poverty and its effects within the United States, with varying degrees of progress and to sometimes detrimental effect.

History in the United States

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. Most inner-city areas of concentrated poverty contained predominantly minority populations, featuring expansive public housing developments. The Bureau of the Census developed the first definition of "low-income areas" as part of its work for the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity, an organization designed to administer President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty programs, part of his Great Society legislative agenda. Overall, these programs were intended to identify major poverty concentrations within large metropolitan areas. An attribute-based criterion formed the original definition, with census tracts ranked by the following:

Income
Average level of education
Number of single-parent households
Percentage of low-skilled workers
Quality of housing stock

Of these, the lowest quartile were designated "low income." Following the 1970 census, attribute-based measures were translated to purely statistical ones, defining "low-income areas" as census tracts with 20%–39% of inhabitants falling under the poverty line, and labeling areas with 40% or more impoverished inhabitants as "high" or "extreme" poverty. Calibration of household income statistics most closely approximating the 1960 census lower quartile lead to the adoption of the 20% threshold adopted in 1970. The 40% threshold designating "high-poverty" areas was set by doubling the low-income threshold, becoming the common definition of "concentrated poverty" in policy and scholarly research.
Paul Jargowsky later developed an alternative measure for concentrated poverty, used more specifically for larger geographical areas. His rate expresses the proportion of all poor individuals in a certain area who live in census tracts of high poverty. Jargowsky further refined the concept of concentrated poverty to more specifically describe the "proportion of the poor in some region city or region that resides in high-poverty neighborhoods," as opposed to a simple territorial designation of high-poverty neighborhoods.
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. 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. These trends related specifically to an African American "underclass" in America's inner cities. In this work, Wilson utilizes concentrated poverty as an analytic measure to gauge the changing spatial organization and intensification of poverty, as a territorial category to designate an object of analysis, and also as a causal factor in and of itself, effecting life chances among the poor. All three conceptualizations have since served as the basis for a wide range of social science research, as well as policy interventions and prescriptions.

Analytic measure

Wilson's study both set the precedent of using the census' 40% threshold and has been adopted as the standard measure for the study of poverty trends and poor neighborhoods. 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.
Both the federal definition of poverty and the census definition of concentrated poverty have received criticism. 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, the non-cash benefits from public sources, the cash and non-cash resources from social and familial networks, and the consideration of regional variations in cost of living expenses. 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. Jargowsky and Bane assert “...that the 40 percent criterion came very close to identifying areas that looked like ghettos in terms of their housing conditions”. They contend that “the areas selected by the 40 percent criterion corresponded closely with the neighborhoods that city officials and local Census Bureau officials considered ghettos”. Thus, these scholars argued that although “any fixed cutoff is inherently arbitrary...the 40 percent criterion appropriately identifies most ghetto neighborhoods”. Here we observe the threshold's justification on the basis of general personal impressions and impressions of city officials rather than any rigorous objective criteria.
In addition to contentious debate regarding the selection of particular percentage thresholds as accurate descriptive measures, other scholars criticized the use of an absolute indicator of poverty concentration as an analytic measure and tool for trend tracking. In one instance, researchers Massey and Eggers contend that a relative, segregation-based indicator is more rigorous and meaningful, claiming that "...levels and trends in poverty concentration are best studied with well-established measures of segregation that use complete information on the spatial distribution of income instead of an ad hoc and arbitrary definition of 'poverty neighborhoods' and 'poverty concentration'" Based on a recent growth of working poor populations and emergence of inner-suburban poverty, Jennifer Wolch and Nathan Sessoms have challenged the utility of the traditional 40% threshold concept of concentrated poverty. Their study shows that several areas in Southern California, which meet the 40% threshold, do not demonstrate the characteristics traditionally associated with areas of concentrated poverty, and do not suffer from extreme levels of dysfunction, crime, and blight. Additionally, they are often reasonably clean, safe, well-maintained, and home to several commercial/retail establishments, public facilities, etc. They also argue that the term has become conflated with "areas of social problems" and argue that the concept should be unhooked from behavioral definitions and stigma.

Territorial category

Areas of concentrated poverty as a territorial category have become both key targets of place-specific policy interventions and the object of analysis for comparative studies within policy research and the social sciences. Its use as a territorial category has also resulted in several critiques, beginning with the question of whether census tracts are good spatial categories for social-scientific analysis. 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. 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. Scholars increasingly conflate areas of concentrated poverty and ghettos, something Wacquant claims camouflages the constitutive role of ethnoracial domination in the ghetto and hyperghetto. 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". Massey and Denton similarly question the use of a purely income-based measure to define areas of deprivation, showing strong empirical evidence and theorizing that high levels of racial segregation produce distinct socio-economic constellations and processes. Additional questions by Wacquant include why rural communities and suburban tracts are often left out of social science analyses focusing on concentrated poverty.