Migration Patterns and the Growth of High‐Poverty Neighborhoods, 1970‐1990

Some of the data used in this analysis are derived from sensitive data files of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, obtained under special contractual arrangements designed to protect the anonymity of respondents. These data are not available from the author. Persons interested in obtaining PSID sensitive data files should contact Abstract The proportion of the population residing in high-poverty urban areas grew in the 1970s and 1980s (Wilson 1987; Jargowsky 1997). This paper examines why the number of high-poverty neighborhoods increased by using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) matched with data on tracts from the decennial census. The main findings are that (1) African Americans are moving into white neighborhoods at a high rate, but the white population is declining in areas with substantial black populations quickly enough that the proportion black in white areas is not increasing and (2) there is no systematic tendency for poverty rates among stayers in poor neighborhoods to increase over time relative to poverty rates of other neighborhood types, although there is some evidence of a larger increase in the poverty rate of moderately poor black neighborhoods than other neighborhood types during the early 1980s recession. Implications of the findings for theories of high-poverty neighborhoods and racial segregation are discussed. William Wilson's book The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) first pointed out that starting in the 1970s areas of concentrated urban poverty increasingly took on a different character than they had earlier in the century. As in the ethnic ghettos that have long interested urban sociologists, dwellers in modern poor urban neighborhoods are almost all members of minority races or ethnicities. Wilson argues, however, that unlike older ethnic ghettos, poor neighborhoods of the 1970s and 1980s contained an especially high concentration of poor families. He hypothesizes that one cause of this trend is that middle-class blacks in the 1970s and 1980s increasingly relocated to predominantly white suburbs, leaving behind neighborhoods composed largely of poor or near-poor families. Wilson's work led empirical researchers to examine data to confirm or deny these suspicions. Investigations by Jargowsky (1994, 1997) have supported some of Wilson's hypotheses, finding that the proportion of the urban population living in census tracts in which at least 40 percent of the population is poor increased from 3 percent of the urban population in 1970 to 4.5 percent in 1990 (Jargowsky 1997, p. 38). Tests of Wilson's hypotheses about why this …