The Geography of American Poverty: Is There a Need for Place-Based Policies? by Mark D. Partridge and Dan S. Rickman

The Geography of American Poverty

Is There a Need for Place-Based Policies?

Mark D. Partridge, Ohio State University
Dan S. Rickman, Oklahoma State University

Introductory chapter | Table of Contents

"This book makes an important contribution to the debate on place-based versus person-based policies. Because the focus is on reducing poverty, rather than reducing poverty concentration or improving the overall economic health of declining areas, it approaches the question from a unique and valuable perpsective. The most important insight is that space matters: economic geography is likely to influence the success of local economic development as a poverty reduction tool. Policymakers, take note."
Journal of Regional Science
"This clear and well-organized book is important reading for anyone interested in poverty policy or labor markets and economic well-being. While the book is pitched to the involved researcher, it is also accessible to non-specialists, partly because the authors have placed so much of the technical material in the appendix and in sidebars, and partly because they conclude each chapter with a long list of bulletted points that summarize the statistical analyses."
Industrial and Labor Relations Review

Poverty rates remain high in many central cities, inner suburbs, and remote rural areas in the United States despite antipoverty gains made nationally during the 1990s. Furthermore, as revealed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, pockets of deep poverty coexist alongside pockets of affluence. Does this disparity unveil some fundamental disconnect between local economic growth and poverty in certain areas across the country? If so, what can be done about it?

Partridge and Rickman explore the wide geographic disparities in poverty across the United States. Their focus on the spatial dimensions of U.S. poverty reveals distinct differences across states, metropolitan areas, and counties and leads them to consider why antipoverty policies have succeeded in some places and failed in others.

In assessing poverty, Partridge and Rickman explore the underlying spatial, demographic, and economic contributors to poverty rates and examine the spatial variation of state and county poverty rates and their trends over time. They find that poverty rates remain remarkably consistent—areas that had high poverty rates in the 1950s tend to have high poverty rates today. Their study includes a statistical assessment of the determinants of state poverty rates, focusing on the roles of economic growth and state public welfare policies. Included are case studies of four states, which confirm the results of their statistical analysis. Partridge and Rickman also

Examine 1989 and 1999 poverty rates for more than 3,000 U.S. counties, uncovering how family characteristics such as marital status and education correlate with poverty.
Consider metropolitan and rural counties and find that the metro counties are not a monolithic block that should be considered in unison.
Distinguish between the effectiveness of economic development policies for central-city residents and for those in the suburbs and describe job creation strategies for central-city counties.
Explore the dimensions of metropolitan and rural poverty and find value in funding economic development projects in rural areas, though such policies may be more costly to implement.
Find that, while labor-market conditions have modest impacts on poverty in general, they can have very important antipoverty impacts in central-city counties and in remote, rural counties.

Place-based policies have been tried but, as the authors admit, they have been generally unsuccessful. In fact, it is not clear whether local job growth helps the poor since many new jobs often go to commuters and new residents already above the poverty threshold. Therefore, economists and policymakers generally prefer people-based policies that augment the skills of disadvantaged individuals. Still, Partridge and Rickman contend that place-based policies are needed to supplement people-based policies primarily because disadvantaged workers are often less likely to move to locations with vibrant economies; jobs need to be created close enough to poor households that residents can take advantage of those jobs, whether they have received training or not. The authors show that the most economically disadvantaged areas experience the greatest reductions in poverty with the creation of new jobs.

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Helping Working Families: The Earned Income Tax Credit, Saul D. Hoffman and Laurence S. Seidman

Rural Dimensions of Welfare Reform, Bruce A. Weber, Greg J. Duncan, and Leslie A. Whitener, eds.

Partridge and Rickman conclude that a unique combination of place-based and person-based policies is needed to help defeat poverty in the most distressed American central cities and remote high-poverty rural communities, and they develop a set of policy recommendations to ensure that job creation efforts benefit the poor—the intended beneficiaries. Overall, they call for a more integrated national poverty reduction strategy that recognizes that “one size doesn’t fit all.”
376 pp. 2006.
$56 cloth ISBN 0-88099-287-5 / ISBN-13 978-0-88099-287-9
$22 paper ISBN 0-88099-286-7 / ISBN-13 978-0-88099-286-2

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