Concentrated Poverty: A Change in Course

No. 2 in The "Neighborhood Change in Urban America" Series

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From the late 1960s through the 1980s, the trends seemed inexorable. Poverty became more and more concentrated in inner city neighborhoods and conditions in those neighborhoods got worse and worse. Data from the 2000 Census show that the 1990s broke those trends:

• Poverty became notably less concentrated in the 1990s. The share of the metropolitan poor who live in "extreme-poverty neighborhoods" (census tracts with poverty rates of 40 percent or more) had jumped from 13 to 17 percent in the 1980s but dropped all the way back to 12 percent in 2000. The share in "high-poverty neighborhoods" (poverty rates of 30 percent or more) increased from 25 to 31 percent in the 1980s but dropped back to 26 percent in 2000. The absolute number of poor people in high-poverty neighborhoods grew from 4.9 million in 1980 to 7.1 million in 1990, but then decreased to 6.7 million in 2000.
• Compensating increases in the 1990s occurred in neighborhoods with middle-range poverty levels rather than in low-poverty areas. The share of all poor people in tracts with poverty rates in the 20-30 percent range increased from 18 to 21 percent and that in the 10-20 percent range from 27 to 29 percent, while that in the 0-10 percent range grew by less than 1 percent.
• An increasing share of high-poverty tracts are in the suburbs of the largest 100 metropolitan areas (15 percent in 2000, up from 11 percent in 1980), but central cities of those metros still retain a dominant if decreasing share (62 percent, down from 67 percent in 1980). The share in the nation's 230 other metropolitan areas remained about the same over this period (22-23 percent).
• The share of all high-poverty tracts with predominantly (more than 60 percent) African-American populations has declined markedly since 1980 (dropping from 48 percent to 39 percent), while those that are predominantly Hispanic went up from 13 to 20 percent and those with no predominant race grew from 21 to 26 percent.
• Changes in concentrated poverty are not primarily due to population growth or decline in a fixed set of neighborhoods. A surprising number of tracts move in and out of high-poverty status each decade. A full 27 percent of all high-poverty tracts in 1990 saw reductions in poverty that took them out of the category by the end of the decade. This was partially offset by tracts equal to 23 percent of the 1990 total moving into the category, yielding a net loss of 4 percent. Even in the preceding decade, 17 percent of the 1980 total saw sufficient declines in poverty to move them out of the category by 1990. But that was offset by tracts equal to a disturbing 58 percent of the total moving in, largely explaining the sizeable net gain in concentrated poverty in that decade.
• There was a nontrivial number of exceptions to the general trend in the 1990s. Poverty became more concentrated in 17 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas: eight in the Northeast (most were predominantly white metros, such as Albany, Hartford, and Worcester), one farther south (Wilmington, DE), and eight in the West (mostly areas with large immigrant populations, such as Los Angeles, Bakersfield, and Stockton). Why these places did not do better warrants more study. The biggest reductions in concentrated poverty in the 1990s took place in the Midwest (which had experienced the biggest increases in the 1980s) and in the South.
• Conditions in neighborhoods in the high-poverty category in 1990 generally improved in the 1990s. For example, the share of adults without a high school degree dropped from 48 to 43 percent, the share of families with children headed by women dropped from 53 to 49 percent, the share of women over 16 who were working went up from 40 to 42 percent, and the share of households receiving public assistance was cut in half, from 24 percent to 12 percent.
• However, conditions in other parts of most metropolitan areas also improved, so gaps in conditions did not diminish much, if at all. For example, the share of adults without a high school degree in high-poverty neighborhoods was 2.1 times the metropolitan average in 1990 but went up to 2.3 times in 2000. On the other hand, the comparable ratio for the share of families with children headed by women improved from 2.3 to 2.0, and that for the share of women over 16 who were working improved from 0.7 to 0.8.

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