 |
Fiscal Consequences Of Concentrated
Poverty In A Metropolitan Region
Does concentrated urban poverty have anything to do
with urban sprawl? New research by Pascale Joassart-Marcelli
(University of Massachusetts, Boston), Juliet Musso
(USC, School of Policy, Planning and Development, and
Jennifer Wolch (USC Geography/Center for Sustainable
Cities) shows that because poverty makes cities more
expensive to run, poor cities with limited fiscal capacity
may be unable to compete for more affluent residents
and businesses with better-off neighboring jurisdictions.
Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation,
Joassart-Marcelli and her colleagues analyzed the impact
of poverty on both anti-poverty and general-purpose
local public expenditure in southern Californian cities.
The main purpose was to evaluate the extent to which
high levels of poverty impose "uncompensated"
costs to local governments - costs not covered by federal
or state anti-poverty programs such as welfare or community
development - thus raising costs for the provision of
non-poverty related services. The team also sought to
analyze the intrametropolitan geographical distribution
of such costs.
Based on data from the past two decades, the analysis
reveals that poverty concentration has a significant
negative effect on the fiscal health of cities by not
only increasing spending on antipoverty programs but
also significantly raising the cost of providing public
services such as police, fire protection, and other
general government functions. Such heightened urban
service delivery costs are typically uncompensated by
federal and state fiscal policies that rarely take poverty
into account in grant allocation formulas. Multivariate
regression analyses suggest that poverty is one of the
most important factors in influencing patterns of local
public expenditures, after controlling for demographic,
institutional, and fiscal characteristics of cities.
Poor cities that experience significantly higher uncompensated
costs and suffer from low fiscal capacity, face severe
fiscal pressure forcing them to either cut services
or raise revenues.This effectively maintains poverty
and inequality within the southern California region,
and fuels sprawl and the environmental degradation that
comes with it.
To read more about this research, please download
a copy of the
report and maps.
back
to publications
back to top |
