Geographic context and concentrated urban poverty within the United States

Responding to previous analyses that assume that places are passive recipie nts of the various macro-level social phenomena associated with concentrate d urban poverty, I hypothesize that concentrated urban poverty takes on dif ferent forms in different places as a result of how macro-level social phen omena are mediated by locally specific structures. To investigate how conce ntrated urban poverty takes on different forms in different places, I first decompose the poverty rates of all high-poverty urban neighborhoods in the United States into their race-specific rate and composition effects, and c lassify high-poverty neighborhoods based on these decomposition values. The results of the analysis demonstrate that poverty in a majority of the high -poverty neighborhoods in the United States is undoubtedly affected by geog raphically specific processes. For example, within one set of high-poverty neighborhoods, poverty is associated with both the lack of economic opportu nity and high rates of class-based residential segregation within mixed-rac e immigrant ethnic/immigrant enclaves in large gateway cities. A second set of high-poverty neighborhoods, located in the metropolitan areas of the so uthern United States, has high rates of poverty because of the residential segregation and geographic concentration of poverty-prone African Americans . And lastly, among a third set of tracts, poverty experiences in African A merican ghettos are linked to declining economic and social opportunities a nd class-based residential segregation within large manufacturing cities. A set of recommendations for additional research includes addressing how one -size-fits-all anti-poverty public policies should be modified for the spec ific needs of each type of high-poverty neighborhood.