Contained Dispersal: The Deconcentration of Poverty in US Metropolitan Areas in the 1990s

After decades of rising poverty segregation in American cities, fewer poor people lived in extreme–poverty neighborhoods in 2000 than in 1990. The decline of concentrated poverty in many US metropolitan areas suggests that the poor may have spread out across metropolitan areas and became less spatially isolated in the 1990s. Most research on poverty trends has focused only on local neighborhood circumstances, however, rather than the spatial segregation of the poor in the wider metropolitan context. This paper builds on previous work by evaluating whether declining concentrated poverty brought the poor closer to more advantaged populations. I ask whether the poor became less concentrated over small land areas, less centralized, and less clustered in neighborhoods near other poor neighborhoods compared to more advantaged groups in the 1990s. I find that the poor did deconcentrate spatially in the 1990s, but mainly among other relatively disadvantaged populations. In fact, the poor became more segregated from the affluent in the 1990s on some spatial dimensions. Structural inequalities maintained spatial distance between the most and least advantaged even in a time of declining concentrated poverty.