Poverty concentrations in large American cities: Factors accounting for the emergence and changing spatial pattern of extreme poverty area

This dissertation examines the location, spatial arrangement, and changing areal extent of poverty areas in thirty large American cities. These extreme poverty areas are the settings of what has become known popularly as the urban underclass.;Chapter one introduces a research design whose goal is to operationalize the spatial concentration of the poor with a measure that differentiates between clustered and dispersed poverty areas. The chapter concludes with a discussion of spatial statistics and its application to the problem of measuring poverty concentration.;Chapter two describes selected characteristics of the thirty cities chosen for the study. Comparisons are made across the thirty cities with detailed statistics on these cities' poverty areas.;Chapter three discusses four main findings of the spatial statistics. First, the dispersion indexes are shown to vary across the urban system with a small standard radius often indicating a clustered poverty area distribution, and a large standard radius indicating a dispersed pattern. Secondly, the dispersion indexes for all cities changed over the 1970 to 1980 time period. Most of these changes occurred as a result of new poverty tracts being added to edges of 1970 core poverty areas. Thirdly, influential outliers and multi-modal distributions indicate that there are both clustered and dispersed settlements within cities. Fourthly, many of the poverty tract clusters of cities became more dispersed between 1970 and 1980.;In chapter four poverty areas are grouped into three categories: persistent poverty areas, new poverty areas, and former poverty areas. Two components of population change, poverty population and non-poverty population, are compared across the three categories. A two level typology of poverty areas is proposed as a more accurate way to describe the settings in which poor people live. The first typology level is based on the compactness of central city poverty areas, and the second typology level is based on how the poverty status of the poverty area changed over a ten year period.