1. What is a High Poverty Neighborhood?
High poverty neighborhoods are those neighborhoods with poverty levels substantially above the national average. Nationally, the poverty rate is about 15 percent. But in some neighborhoods, poverty rates are much higher. Different studies have used different threshholds to identify “high” poverty neighborhoods. Some studies point to negative effects of concentrated poverty at poverty rates of 20 percent or higher. Other studies use 40 percent poverty to define neighborhoods of cocncentrated poverty. We use a threshold value of 30 percent—highlighting neighborhoods that have poverty rates that are double or more the national average.
Over the past four decades, the poverty rate in the United States has fluctuated between about 11.5 percent and 15 percent. In 1970, the national poverty rate was about 13.7 percent. In 2011, the poverty rate nationally stood at 15 percent.
2. How is poverty determined?
Poverty status is determined on a household basis. The Department of Health and Human Services established a budget based on household size and urban/rural location. Currently, the poverty line for an urban family of four is approximately $23,500 per year in 2012. All persons living in a household with an income below this amount are counted as poor.
As part of both the Census and the American Community Survey, the Census Bureau analyzes household income and the number of persons living in a household and determines whether a households income falls above or below the poverty line, as adjusted for household size. While the dollar value of the poverty line changes from decade to decade, the underlying concept remains the same (the poverty line is adjusted for the change in consumer price inflation from year to year).
3. Why is concentrated poverty particularly bad?
Concentrated poverty is a particular concern because all of the negative effects of poverty appear to be amplified in neighborhoods composed primarily of poor people. Poverty anywhere and in any amount is a problem; but concentrated poverty is often intractable and self-reinforcing.
Economic isolation exacerbates the problems associated with poverty. Neighborhoods with concentrated poverty make it harder to find positive role models and connect to social networks that enable employment, and they intensify problems of crime and drug abuse (Jargowsky, 2003). Like racial segregation, segregation by income has harmful effects on low-income people, including worse economic outcomes for adults, higher school dropout and teenage pregnancy rates, and worse academic achievement for schoolchildren. Research shows that those poor people who live in mixed-income areas do better than poor people who live in areas of concentrated poverty (Jargowsky & Swanstrom, 2009).
In contrast, if a community has a high degree of economic integration—defined as a mix of households in different income groups, rather than concentrated poverty—it is more likely that the quality of public services and amenities will be similar throughout the region, and low income families will have better access to these things than when they are geographically isolated
4. How many high poverty neighborhoods are there in the US?
In 2010, there were 3,000 census tracts in the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas that had poverty rates of 30 percent or higher. These neighborhoods had a total population of x.x million, of which x.x million were in poverty.
5. How common is gentrification of poor neighborhoods?
As one measure of gentrification, we identified Census tracts where the poverty rate had declined from 30 percent or more to less than 15 percent (approximately the current national average) since 1970. Of the 1,100 high poverty census tracts in large urban areas in 1970, only about 100 saw their poverty rates decline to 15 percent or less by 2010. If you lived in one of those high poverty census tracts in 1970, the odds that your neighborhood had a lower than 15 percent poverty rate forty years later were about 1 in 20.
Most of the neighborhoods that had high poverty in 1970 continued to have high poverty over the next four decades. But while they remained poor, that did not mean that they did not change. High poverty neighborhoods generally lost population. In the aggregate, high poverty neighborhoods that did not gentrify (see poverty drop to less than 15 percent) saw their population decline by about 40 percent over the next four decades.
6. Where is concentrated poverty growing?
7. Is poverty worse in the suburbs?
Briefly, the number of persons in poverty is increasing more in suburbs than in cities, but the poverty rate in cities is still much higher, on average, than in suburbs.
Recent studies (Kneebone: http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/concentrated-poverty#/M10420) have highlighted the growth in the number of poor people living in suburbs. But in interpreting these data, its important to acknowledge differences between the level of poverty and the change in the number of the poor. The number of poor people living in the nation’s suburbs is increasing, but the poverty rate is still much higher in central cities and close in urban neighborhoods than in the outlying portions of metropolitan areas. On average, the poverty rate in central cities is about double the poverty rate in the suburbs of the same metropolitan area.
Also, its important to remember that as defined statistically, most of the nation’s metropolitan population, and nearly all of its population growth, has been in areas that are classified as suburban. So its little surprise that as the total number of people living in suburban jurisdictions grows, so too does the poverty population.
But the level of poverty—defined by the poverty rate, is still, on average much higher in central cities than in suburbs.
Its also important to keep in mind that the statistics used to define “cities” and “suburbs” rely on the boundaries of political jurisdictions. The central city is defined as the central and usually largest municipality in a region, and the suburbs are the remainder of the metropolitan area. In some metropolitan areas, the central city is less than 10 percent of the region’s population; in other metropolitan areas, the central city can make up half or more of the region’s population and encompass newer low density single family neighborhoods that most people would regard as suburban in character.
Studies that use Geographic Information System (GIS) software to measure physical distances consistently rather than using varying political boundaries to distinguish between close-in urban neighborhoods and the remainder of the metropolitan area consistently find that poverty rates are much higher in the urban core than in the suburban periphery. On average, in 2010, among metropolitan areas with populations of one million or more, poverty rates within 3 miles of the center of a region’s central business district were more than double the metro area average (Cortright, 2012). Poverty rates were higher in these close-in urban neighborhoods in 50 of the 51 largest metro areas (the only exception was New York City).