ABSTRACT
Although U.S. housing markets may soon reach stabilization, structural shifts within the social and economic environment will continue to have impacts on the housing conditions of the poor. Those impacts include persistent marginalization by swelling housing cost burdens, growing shelter insufficiency, and socio-spatial restriction to the lowest-income communities (Pelletiere, 2009). Socio-spatial isolation is an outgrowth of historic patterns that overwhelmingly located subsidized housing within low-income neighborhoods—contributing to the concentration of low-income minority households in communities shut off from economic opportunities, access to adequate services, and quality education (Belsky and Drew, 2007; Erickson et al., 2008). Research examining the longitudinal trends of poverty concentration shows increases between the 1970s and 1990s in response to “school desegregation, deindustrialization and the exodus of white and eventually middle class blacks to the suburbs” (Jargowsky, 2003, p. 6). During the 1990s socio-economic divides decreased due to “economic growth, changes in federal policy and bank lending practices and the revitalization of downtowns” (p. 7), encouraging investment and decreasing geographic isolation. However, this research suggests that, since 2000, concentrated poverty may again be increasing (Jargowsky, 2003, 2008).
