These neighborhoods generally lack healthy food options, top-performing public schools and quality medical care. High-poverty neighborhoods are also more likely to expose residents to crime and environmental hazards, such as lead and smog. As the federal government launched a new website for parents and caregivers eligible for an expanded child tax credit, the Casey Foundation released a state data report that argues for making the expansion permanent.
Frequency and Timespan: Reports issued irregularly, data for the the period to Geographic level of coverage: Estimates of concentrated poverty for states and regions. Publications available online. Census Bureau, Areas with Concentrated Poverty: Census Bureau. Poverty Areas. Areas with Concentrated Poverty: This report, authored by Paul A. Jargowsky, compares the census data with the American Community Survey ACS , revealing the extent to which concentrated poverty has returned to, and in some ways exceeded, the previous peak level in Frequency and Timespan: One-time report covering to the present.
They are more likely to fall in older industrial regions in the Midwest and Northeast, often in inner-ring suburbs e. Between and , the number of high poverty neighborhoods with poverty rates between 20 percent and 40 percent nationwide grew by more than 4,—more than three times the growth in extremely poor neighborhoods with poverty rates exceeding 40 percent over that time period. As a result, the majority of poor people 55 percent in the United States now live in a high poverty or extremely poor area Table 5.
While only 41 percent of poor suburban residents lived in such communities in , a number of indicators suggest that neighborhood distress is on the rise in suburbs. Following the recession, suburbs posted a 10 percentage point increase in the share of poor residents living in neighborhoods with poverty rates of at least 20 percent—almost double the increase in big cities and a larger uptick than those in small metro areas or rural communities.
Nationally, suburbs accounted for one-third What is more, the likelihood of living in a disadvantaged suburban neighborhood in the post-recession period varied markedly depending on race and ethnicity.
The share of poor black and Hispanic suburban residents living in neighborhoods with poverty rates of at least 20 percent climbed by more than 10 percentage points between and Figure 3. While poor white residents in the suburbs experienced an uptick of almost 8 percentage points in concentrated disadvantage in that period, just one in four lived in high poverty or extremely poor neighborhoods in Poor black and Hispanic residents experienced concentrated disadvantage at more than twice that rate.
Tracking the national average, more than half of poor black and Hispanic residents in the suburbs lived in a neighborhood with a poverty rate of at least 20 percent.
While high poverty neighborhoods grew in the same regions and types of communities that experienced upticks in extremely poor tracts, they also emerged in an even broader array of places in recent years. The Washington, D. The rapid spread of poverty and its increasing concentration outside of the urban core, particularly following the Great Recession, challenges long-held assumptions about where poor people live and where distressed neighborhoods are located within regions.
But not only has public perception lagged behind the changing landscape of poverty, the traditional policy and practice playbook that has evolved over decades to address poverty in place has also failed to keep up with the larger scale and more diverse geography of need that exists today.
As a first order challenge, the proliferation of distressed and disadvantaged neighborhoods in recent years further strains already limited resources—from the federal level to the local—targeted to such places. The rapidly increasing likelihood that these neighborhoods are located in suburban communities or smaller metropolitan areas brings additional layers of complexity because these places often lack the necessary infrastructure, safety net supports, and capacity to address these challenges.
Add to that the fact that struggling suburbs are often set up to compete, rather than collaborate, with urban areas for what resources and programs exist to address poverty in place.
While many cities have been dealing with concentrated poverty for longer and continue to have critical needs, they also tend to have developed more capacity and experience navigating these issues and the policy landscape as a consequence. In that context, suburbs and other similarly situated communities often fail to attract what resources are available through competitive funding streams, which only perpetuates the resource and capacity gaps that plague many of the communities hit hardest by recent, but rapid, increases in poverty.
Rather, the increasingly regional footprint of poverty and concentrated disadvantage calls for regional solutions that work across city and suburban boundaries. Whether targeting investments to help improve and revitalize distressed neighborhoods or implementing mobility strategies that open up opportunities for low-income residents in other lower-poverty areas, striking the right balance and effectively implementing those strategies requires a regional perspective. It also requires an integrated approach to decisionmaking at the metropolitan scale around transportation, economic and workforce development, and—perhaps most important to overcoming patterns of segregation—land use, zoning, and affordable housing.
Many metro areas across the country are already working regionally on strategies to increase access to opportunity for urban and suburban residents alike. In the Denver region, Mile High Connects is helping to leverage the expansion of the transit network to increase access to housing choices , jobs, and services for low-income and minority residents. In regions like Chicago and Baltimore , metro areas are finding ways to strategically use housing subsidies to increase options in higher opportunity areas for low-income families.
The four vertical lines represent the median neighborhood poverty rate for poor and nonpoor residents for each of the cities. Our measure of concentrated poverty is the differences in these vertical lines for each metropolitan area—a larger difference means greater concentration of poverty. Focusing first on Scranton, we see that the median poor and nonpoor live in neighborhoods with relatively similar poverty rates. The difference in the poverty rates in these neighborhoods is 3 percentage points.
In contrast, the median poor and nonpoor live in neighborhoods with very different poverty rates in Milwaukee. There the difference in poverty rates is 21 percentage points. Figures 3a and 3b show the measure of the concentration of poverty for the 15 most concentrated metro areas in the and — samples.
Several points are worth noting. First, in both figures, old industrial metro areas have the highest concentrated poverty and are located in the top area of the chart. Second, there was a substantial shift out in the distribution of concentrated poverty between figure 3a and — figure 3b. Third, Federal Reserve Fourth District metro areas are well represented in figure 3b. The increased concentration of poverty across the top metro areas is shown clearly in figure 4.
Metro areas above the 45 degree line in the figure experienced an increase in concentration over the years in question, while metro areas below the 45 degree line experienced a decrease in the concentration of poverty. We can clearly see that most metropolitan areas experienced an increase in concentration: Of the metro areas in our sample, 83 experienced an increase in concentration.
All eight Fourth District metro areas in our sample experienced increases in concentration. Figure 4 also shows that concentrated poverty is persistent. Metro areas with high degrees of concentrated poverty in tended to have high degrees of concentrated poverty in —, and vice versa.
We know that the overall poverty rate increased dramatically from Unsurprisingly, the median neighborhood poverty rate also increased between and —, from 8.
However, it should be noted that while these are the most recent tract-level data available, they do not reflect the full effect of the recession since the averages contain data from years that preceded the recession and Despite these recent increases in poverty rates at the individual, neighborhood, and metropolitan levels, it does not necessary follow that the concentration of poverty also increased.
It could be that all neighborhoods in a region are equally affected by the rise in overall poverty rates. However, that is not the case. What we find is the metropolitan areas that experienced a sharper rise in poverty rates also experienced an increase in the concentration of poverty figure 5a. In these metro areas the difference in neighborhood poverty rates of the median poor person and the median nonpoor person was growing wider.
Not surprisingly, this rise in the concentration of poverty was also related to changes in economic conditions in metropolitan areas.
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