Number of people living in high-poverty areas drops

WASHINGTON — Poverty in the United States became far less concentrated in the 1990s as public housing projects were torn down and millions of poor people left urban slums for other neighborhoods, a new study of Census Bureau data says.

The number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods declined by 2.5 million, or 24 percent, to 7.9 million in 2000 from 10.4 million in 1990, the researchers said.

The author of the study, Paul A. Jargowsky, an associate professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, described this as "a significant turnaround from the 1970-90 period, during which the population in high-poverty neighborhoods doubled."

In 1990, 15 percent of all poor people lived in high-poverty neighborhoods. By 2000, the proportion had declined to 10 percent, according to the study, issued on Saturday by the Brookings Institution.

"Concentrated poverty — the share of the poor living in high-poverty neighborhoods — declined among all racial and ethnic groups, especially African-Americans," Jargowsky said.

In 1990, 30 percent of poor blacks lived in high-poverty neighborhoods. Ten years later, the proportion was 19 percent.

Jargowsky said the changes were generally beneficial.

"Concentrations of poor people lead to a concentration of the social ills that cause or are caused by poverty," Jargowsky said. "School districts are often organized geographically, so the residential concentration of the poor frequently results in low-performing schools."

The Census Bureau has not issued any studies on the concentration of poverty based on the 2000 census. But Jargowsky used census data to analyze high-poverty neighborhoods, which he defined as those where at least 40 percent of the residents had incomes below the official poverty level. A family of four was classified as poor in 2000 if it had cash income less than $17,603.

The study defined a neighborhood as a census tract. The population of tracts varies widely, but averages 4,000 people. The number of high-poverty census tracts declined to 2,510 in 2000 from 3,417 in 1990, Jargowsky said.

The economy was expanding for most of the 1990s, but that alone does not explain what Jargowsky described as the "deconcentration of poverty." Despite the strong economy, the number of people classified as poor in the 2000 census was slightly higher than the number counted a decade earlier.