Full Citation

Title: Where Poor Renters Live in our Cities

Citation Type: Conference Paper

Publication Year: 2006

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Abstract: Where the poor live and why has an enormous impact on access to jobs, decent quality schools, and other local attributes that affect a familys ability to rise up out of poverty. Low-income families also rely disproportionately on rental housing for their accommodations. Accordingly, because rental housing support programs affect the location opportunities for the poor, it is important to consider the broader set of factors that drive where poor neighborhoods are found. Failure to do so could undermine the effectiveness of well-intended initiatives. With that in mind, this paper provides a framework and evidence that helps to characterize where poor neighborhoods tend to be found, and why. Results indicate that many neighborhoods exhibit considerable persistence in poverty levels over the 1970 to 2000 period, but many other neighborhoods do not. Persistence is by far the highest among communities with poverty rates below 15 percent: roughly 80 percent of these communities retain their low poverty status between 1970 and 2000. Other neighborhoods however, display much less persistence. Among very high poverty tracts (tracts with over 40 percent poverty), persistence between 1970 and 2000 is just 43 percent. Thus, over half of the highest poverty neighborhoods in 1970 were of lower poverty status thirty years later.What contributes to this variety of experience? Further analysis in the paper suggests that change in local poverty rates arise from four very different mechanisms: access to public transit, the presence of aging housing stocks, local spillover effects arising from social interactions, and the presence of place-based subsidized rental housing (i.e. public and LIHTC housing). Together, these factors explain a considerable portion of the one-decade ahead change in census tract poverty rates. However, on balance, it is still difficult to anticipate where the poor will live several decades out into the future. Yet place-based subsidized housing is both spatially fixed and long lived. For that reason, at least with respect to implications for location opportunities, flexible tenant-based rental housing support programs appear to offer advantages.

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Authors: Rosenthal, Stuart S.

Conference Name: Revisiting Rental Housing: A National Policy Summit

Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Housing and Segregation, Other, Poverty and Welfare

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