Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, researchers came to understand poor urban neighborhoods as blighted, depopulated areas, based on important field observations in a handful of cities. This image helped inform influential theories of social isolation and de-institutionalization. However, few scholars have examined whether those observations were representative of poor neighborhoods at the time—and whether they are representative today. Based on an analytically descriptive study of the largest 100 U.S. metropolitan areas and using normalized census tract boundaries, we document an important transformation in the conditions of poor neighborhoods. We find that the depopulation in poor neighborhoods reported in cities such as Chicago and Baltimore in the late eighties and early nineties was, in fact, typical across cities. However, while today it remains common in Chicago, Baltimore, and other often-observed cities, those cities no longer represent typical conditions. With respect to depopulation, poor neighborhoods have become more heterogeneous across cities, creating a new kind of inequality. In a handful of places, poor neighborhoods now exhibit extreme forms of depopulation, suggesting the possibility of especially pernicious neighborhood effects in an increasingly narrow subset of cities. We conclude by discussing both methodological and substantive implications: that what ethnographers report about poor neighborhoods depends far more than it did 25 years ago on which particular city they happen to select for observation; and that how much neighborhoods matter, with respect to outcomes shaped by depopulation, depends more than in the past on the city in which the poor happen to live.