POVERTY-AREA INSTABILITY: THE CASE OF CHICAGO

Recent studies have shown that (officially designated) poverty areas in large American cities have expanded geographically each decade since their inception in 1960. The territorial expansion of poverty areas in the 1970s was especially severe in Chicago, where new poverty-area growth exceeded the geographic extent of preexisting poverty areas. In the more recent decade of the 1980s, the expansion of Chicago's poverty areas slowed significantly. An analysis ofthis expansion process for Chicago, using 1970, 1980, and 1990 census data, illustrates that the movement of neighborhoods into and out of poverty is related to their previous poverty level, relative location, and rate of population loss. The recent slowdown in the geographic expansion of Chicago's poverty areas is highly correlated with the declining city-wide rate of population loss. Irrespective of this slowdown in territorial expansion, the residential function of Chicago's poverty areas is becoming increasingly obsolete as fewer and fewer people are residing in them.