Poor and Left Behind

High-poverty Census Tracts in Metropolitan Areas, 1970-1990

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina raised public awareness of concentrated poverty. To the horror and dismay of many television viewers around the country, residents of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans were left behind when the levies broke and their neighborhoods flooded.  Dismay soon gave way to disgust and anger at the ineptitude of the institutions and individuals ostensibly responsible for responding to such crises.

But long before the hurricane struck, the poverty-stricken residents of New Orleans had already been left behind. “Left behind” describes all high-poverty communities.

A high-poverty neighborhood is defined as a census tract where at least 40 percent of the residents are in families living in poverty.¹ A much more direct term is “ghetto.” That’s a word that evokes images of urban poverty, but the United States also has high-poverty rural areas, delineated by county. In rural areas, African Americans are more “ghettoized” than in the cities, with 75 percent living in high-poverty areas.² Poor whites in rural areas are more numerous than poor minorities, but they are less likely to be segregated from non-poor whites.

The casinos of Atlantic City, shown in the background, have had little effect on reducing persistent poverty in neighborhoods nearby.

The services one takes for granted in middle-class communities vanish in high-poverty areas. Supermarkets with a wide selection of groceries and local hospitals are two examples. These days it would be unusual to find a high-poverty community where payday lenders and check cashing outlets did not outnumber banks. “Why does one need a bank account when one doesn’t have a job?” asks a resident of Miami’s Little Haiti community.³

Poor people are consigned to high-poverty neighborhoods because this is what poverty provides. Would they live elsewhere if they could? Some would. We know this by the popularity of housing-voucher programs that offer families an option to move to a different community.⁴ But a program that enables a few people to move away doesn’t solve the problem of high-poverty communities, and it can undercut the goal of solving the problems of an entire community by shifting the focus to individuals.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is the latest high-profile person to embody the American “rags to riches” story. Countless others have come before her—it’s certainly not impossible to escape an upbringing in a poor community. We delight in hearing these success stories. Hollywood has developed an assembly line devoted to producing movies of individual success. And our admiration for the
“self-made man” stretches back before the celluloid era, as shown by the wildly popular Horatio Alger books of the 19^th century. It suits the American mythos of rugged individualism to know that the triumph of the human spirit is possible anywhere. But these are the exceptions that confirm the rule. The fact that people like Sonia Sotomayor are so rare tells us something about “upward mobility” and the nature of life in poor communities.

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