Concentrated poverty

Concentrated poverty refers to a spatial density of socio-economic deprivation. In the US, it is commonly used in fields of policy and scholarship in reference to areas of "extreme" or "high-poverty" defined by the US census as areas with "40 percent of the tract population living below the federal poverty threshold." A large body of literature argues that these areas of concentrated poverty place additional burdens on poor families that live within them, beyond what the families' own individual circumstances would dictate. The research also indicates that areas of concentrated poverty can have wider effects on surrounding neighborhoods that are not classified as "high-poverty," thus limiting overall economic potential and social cohesion.

There have long been areas of concentrated poverty, and the distinct social problems of concentrated poverty, which exacerbate individual impoverishment have been the grounds of reform movements and studies since the mid-19th Century. However, the measure of concentrated poverty and the coalescence around an analytical conception of concentrated poverty occurred only in the 1970s. This more recent focus on concentrated poverty grew largely out of concern about the nation’s inner cities in the wake of ongoing deindustrialization, civil unrest in the late 1960s, and the rapid suburbanization and out-migration that followed. In most cases, these poor inner city locations were populated predominantly by minorities, and many featured large public housing developments.

The definition for "low-income areas" first developed by the Bureau of the Census as part of its work for the newly established Office of Economic Opportunity, a new bureaucracy designed to administer most of the War on Poverty Programs created as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society legislative agenda. The goal was to identify areas of major concentrations of poverty within large metropolitan areas. The original definition was formed through an attribute-based criterion. Each census tract was ranked by an equally weighted measurement of (1) an area's income, (2) level of education, (3) number of single-parent households, (4) percentage of low-skilled workers, and (5) quality of the housing stock. The lowest quartile from the rankings were then designated "low income." The 1970 census took the earlier attribute-based measure and translated it into a purely statistical one - defining "low-income areas" as census tracts with 20%-39% of its inhabitants falling below the poverty line and designating areas of "high-poverty" or “extreme poverty” as those with 40% or more of its inhabitants falling under the poverty line. The 20% threshold adopted in 1970 was derived by calibrating a statistic of household income that most closely approximated the 1960 lower quartile. The 40% threshold to designate "high-poverty areas" was set by doubling the low-income threshold. This 40% threshold became the common definition of "concentrated poverty" in policy and scholarly research.

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