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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."〔Bureau of the Census. 1970. “Low-Income Areas in Large Cities”. Subject Report. U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington D.C.〕 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.〔“The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S.”, n.d., http://www.frbsf.org/cpreport/〕 ==History== The Invention of the Measure 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.〔Bureau of the Census. 1970. “Low-Income Areas in Large Cities”. Subject Report. U.S. Department of Commerce: Washington D.C.〕 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 areas 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. Another measure of concentrated poverty used for larger geographical areas was later developed by Paul Jargowsky. His rate expresses the proportion of all poor individuals in a certain area (e.g., city, metropolitan region, or county) who live in census tracts of high poverty.〔Jargowsky, Paul A. 1997. Poverty and place: Ghettos, barrios, and the American city. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.〕 Later, Jargowsky uses the concept of concentrated poverty to refer more specifically to the "proportion of the poor in some region city or region that resides in high-poverty neighborhoods" as opposed to a territorial designation of high-poverty neighborhoods 〔Jargowsky, Paul A. Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s. Living Cities Census Series, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Studies. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, May 2003.〕 The Invention of the Concept The first major work of scholarship to utilize the census measure to study the changing spatial trends of poverty, as well as its causes and effects, was William Julius Wilson in his book ''The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy''.〔Wilson, W. 1987: The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and Public Policy. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.〕 His findings revealed that tracts of concentrated poverty increased dramatically, not only in Chicago, but throughout metropolitan areas of the United States during the 1970s, as did the population of poor people residing within them. These trends related specifically to an African American "underclass" in America's inner city (see trends below). In this work, Wilson utilizes concentrated poverty as an ''analytic measure'' to gauge the changing spatial organization and intensification of poverty, as a ''territorial category'' to designate an object of analysis and, and also as a ''causal factor'' in and of itself, effecting life chances among the poor. All three of these conceptualizations have since served as the basis for a wide range of social science research as well as policy interventions and prescriptions. ''Analytic Measure'' Wilson's study set the precedent of using the census' 40% threshold and this has been adopted as the standard measure to study trends of poverty and poor neighborhoods. This is largely due to the measure's convenience rather than any strong conceptual justification. The measure is used to compare degree of poverty concentration between areas and the growth or decline in the number of tracts that fit this qualification in a given city, region, or country. Critiques of the measure have been leveled against both the federal definition of poverty as well as the census definition of concentrated poverty by the 40% threshold. In both cases, the overall discussion has questioned the use of a bureaucratic category designed to facilitate the routine collection of statistics and the determination of eligibility of public assistance, geared to managerial concerns of the state as being unfit for capturing urban social structures and strategies. Criticisms of the poverty threshold are legion,〔Madden, J. 1996. “Changes in the Distribution of Poverty Across and Within the U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1979-1989”. Urban Studies 33,9:1581-1600.〕 the most salient being the inability to fully consider the needs of different family types (e.g.: the need for childcare services, health insurance, etc.), the non-cash benefits from public sources, the cash and non-cash resources or lack thereof from social and familial networks, and the consideration of regional variations in cost of living expenses. At the same time, the 40 percent benchmark used by the census and scholars to define concentrated poverty does not refer to any adequately specified objective or subjective criteria. Jargowsky and Bane (1991) assert “...that the 40 percent criterion came very close to identifying areas that looked like ghettos in terms of their housing conditions” (p. 239). They contend that “the areas selected by the 40 percent criterion corresponded closely with the neighborhoods that city officials and local Census Bureau officials considered ghettos” (p. 239). Thus, these scholars argued that although “any fixed cutoff is inherently arbitrary...the 40 percent criterion appropriately identifies most ghetto neighborhoods” (p. 239). Here we see that the use of the threshold is justified on the basis of a general personal impressions and impressions of city officials rather than any rigorous objective criteria.〔Jargowsky, P. and Bane, M. 1991. “Ghetto Poverty in the United States, 1970 to 1980”. in The Urban Underclass edited by Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.〕 Aside from the contention over the selection of a particular percentage threshold as an accurate descriptive measure (i.e. 30% vs. 60% threshold of residents in poverty), other scholars have criticized the use of an absolute indicator of poverty concentration as an analytic measure and tool to track trends. For instance, Massey and Eggers contend that a relative indicator based on segregation is more rigorous and meaningful, claiming that ". . .levels and trends in poverty concentration are best studied with well-established measures of segregation that use complete information on the spatial distribution of income instead of an ad hoc and arbitrary definition of 'poverty neighborhoods' and 'poverty concentration'" 〔Bol, Manute. and Eggers, M. 1990. “The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the Concentration of Poverty, 1970-1980”. American Journal of Sociology 95(5): 1156. cited in Wolch, Jennifer and Nathan Sessoms."The Changing Face of Concentrated Poverty."〕 Jennifer Wolch and Nathan Sessoms have challenged the utility of the traditional concept of concentrated poverty based on the 40% threshold due to the recent growth of working poor populations and the emergence of inner-suburban poverty.〔Wolch, Jennifer and Nathan Sessoms."The Changing Face of Concentrated Poverty." http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/lusk/research/pdf/wp_2005-1004.pdf〕 Their study shows that several areas in Southern California, which meet the 40% threshold do not demonstrate the characteristics traditionally associated with areas of concentrated poverty and not suffer from extreme levels of dysfunction, crime, and blight, but are often reasonably clean, safe, well-maintained and home to several commercial/retail establishments, public facilities, etc. They also argue that the term has become conflated with "areas of social problems" and argue that the concept should be unhooked from behavioral definitions and stigma. ''Territorial Category'' As a territorial category, areas of concentrated poverty have become both key targets of place specific policy interventions as well as the object of analysis for comparative studies in policy research and the social sciences. Several critiques have been raised against this territorial category of "concentrated poverty." First, is the question of whether census tracts are a good spatial category of social scientific analysis. A Systematic field observations in various inner-city areas reveals that census tracts are poor proxies of what residents construe and construct as neighborhoods in their daily routines.〔Sanchez-Jankowski, M. 2008. Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods. Berkeley: University of California Press.〕 Sociologist Loic Wacquant has criticized the measure when used to denote or define “ghettos". This reference was first made by Bane and Jargowsky and William Julius Wilson (see above), and scholars increasingly conflate the two, which Wacquant claims camouflages the constitutive role of ethnoracial domination in the ghetto and hyperghetto. Wacquant claims that this income-based notion of the ghetto is "ostensibly deracialized" and largely a product of policy-geared research fearful of the "strict taboo that weighs on segregation in the political sphere".〔Wacquant, L. 2011. “A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto.” Pp. 1-31 in Ray Hutchison and Bruce Haynes (eds.), The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies, Boulder, Westview, 201.〕 Massey and Denton similarly questions the use of a purely income based measure to define these areas of deprivation, who shows with strong empirical evidence and solid theorizing that high levels of racial segregation (defined by an index of dissimilarity above 60) produce distinct socio-economic constellations and processes.〔Massey, D., and Nancy Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.〕 Wacquant also questions why it is that rural counties and suburban tracts are often left out of social science analysis of concentrated poverty. ''Causal Factor'' As explored more fully in the section on effects, concentrated poverty has increasingly been recognized as a "causal factor" in compounding the effects of poverty by isolating residents in these neighborhoods from networks and resources useful to realize human potential. In ''The Truly Disadvantaged'', William Julius Wilson coined these processes as "concentration effects." The primary effect is what he termed social isolation, defined as the lack of contact or of sustained interaction with individuals and institutions that represent mainstream society. This isolation makes it much more difficult for those who are looking for jobs to be tied into the job network and also generates behavior not conducive to good work histories. What is key in Wilson's idea of social isolation is that he links the behavioral outcomes of the ghetto poor to the structural constraints of the job market and historical discrimination. This goes against the theory of a "culture of poverty," which implies that basic values and attitudes of the ghetto subculture have been internalized and places a strong emphasis on the autonomous character of the cultural traits once they come into existence.〔Lewis, O. 1959. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic Books.〕 A number of scholars have problematized this causal framing. For Wilson, concentrated poverty was a link between structural factors and social behaviors produced through "concentration effects", however, much subsequent policy and scholarly research have ignored these deeper causes of concentrated poverty itself. According to Agnew, "One can start out using spatial concepts as shorthand for complex sociological processes but slip easily into substituting the spatial concepts for the more complex argument''.〔Agnew J, 1993, "Representing space, scale and culture in social science", in Place/Culture/ Representation Eds J Duncan, D Ley (Routledge, New York) pp 251-271〕 Steinberg has claimed that this amounts to misdiagnosing the symptom as the disease, as the structural factors are severed from the spatial outcome, policy prescriptions to address concentrated poverty have shifted from economic policies to encourage full-employment to simply deconcentrating poverty (see section below).〔Steinberg, S. (2010). The Myth of Concentrated Poverty. In The Integration Debate: Competing Futures for American Cities. Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires, eds. Pp.228–301. New York: Routledge.〕 As Goetz observed, “Over time, focus has shifted away from the causes of concentrated poverty toward the behavior of the poor in response to concentrated poverty," which ultimately has led to reproducing the "culture of poverty" thesis in severing the theory from its structural roots.〔Goetz, E. (2003). Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute Press〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「concentrated poverty」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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