IPR Research Notes

Poverty Concentration and Public Housing

Fall 2009 , Volume 31, Number 1

Lincoln Quillian

Public housing has come to symbolize the problems of urban, high-poverty neighborhoods. “But to what extent are public housing projects really to blame for concentrated areas of poverty?” asked Lincoln Quillian.

Quillian, an IPR sociologist, has developed a new model to examine the formation of high-poverty areas across the United States, including the influence of both public and private housing markets. The model is part of ongoing work with Elizabeth Bruch of the University of Michigan to develop realistic, data-based simulation models of neighborhood formation.

The first demographic research on public housing and spatial concentration of poverty dates back to professors Douglas Massey and Shawn Kanaiaupuni’s 1993 study. Looking at public housing construction in Chicago between 1950 and 1970, the researchers found that poverty had gone up 11 percent by 1980 in those areas where projects were located.

While past research has done a good job of documenting mobility in surrounding neighborhoods after public housing construction, it overstated the impact of housing projects on poverty concentration. Quillian explained this is because earlier studies failed to account for where residents would live if not in public housing.

Using data on all U.S. public housing sites, Quillian generated a series of demographic simulations. He avoided the methodological trap of previous studies that “just shift the poor around” by creating more realistic simulations in which public housing residents are relocated in the private market.

Overall, public housing has had some effect on concentrated poverty in “creating some tracts with extreme poverty rates,” Quillian said, “but it’s not a main cause of concentrated poverty nationwide.” He pointed out that public housing represents less than 1 percent of total U.S. housing—and even if public housing were eliminated, most residents would wind up in similarly poor and racially segregated communities. Since poverty rates in these neighborhoods would increase, poverty concentration would decrease very little, if at all.

Quillian’s results suggest that shifting from fixed-site to portable forms of housing assistance, such as vouchers, will tend to reduce the number of extreme-poverty neighborhoods, or census tracts with poverty rates above 50 percent, but increase the number of moderate and high poverty neighborhoods.

“Broader reductions in concentrated poverty would require breaking down race and class segregation in the private housing market,” he said.

For more information about these and other IPR research projects, please visit www.northwestern.edu/ipr/.