Neighborhood Poverty

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In the 1990s, the federal government was concerned with increasing concentration of poverty in the inner city. Shroder and Orr report the government believed that gang activities and crack cocaine epidemic had resulted in a tenfold increase in the rate of homicide among African American teens since the late 1980s (2012). Especially, after the demolition of near 100,000 public housing units, the government urgently sought concentrations of poverty. This assumption that concentration of poverty is anchored in place have become popular, and MTO suited to illustrate the degree of harmfulness of concentrations of poverty. MTO moved randomly selected families living in high poverty neighborhood to low poverty neighborhoods as it aimed to provide …show more content…

Yet the study was not intended to solve multigenerational poverty. While many of the adult participants had lived in extreme poverty for decades, which is self-evidently rooted in more than housing issue, childhood exposure to low poverty neighborhood can generate more significant differences in mean outcomes (Chetty & Katz, 2015). As the experiment aims to observe positive changes brought in by improved housing and neighborhood conditions, Chetty & Katz (2015) finds improvements in “several key adult mental and physical health outcomes.” These include significantly lowered risk of diabetes and obesity, as well as an improved level of well-being such as lower prevalence of anxiety, depression and psychological distress. However, the absence of adults’ socioeconomic improvement in MTO outcomes indicates neighborhood effects operate primarily through “developmental" effects during childhood. Living in low poverty neighborhoods and higher-quality homes may not solve multigenerational economic disparities, yet perhaps the most important intervention in the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage are the long-term effects on children of living in extreme …show more content…

Most importantly, MTO provides insight into the ways in which neighborhoods do and do not affect individual outcomes; a key determinant of an individual's long-term positive outcomes is childhood. Chetty and Katz (2015) address the findings suggest that “efforts to integrate disadvantaged families into mixed-income communities are likely to reduce the persistence of poverty across generations.” Therefore, I believe the efforts to reduce the concentrations of poverty ought to begin with interrupting multigenerational

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