Public Housing and the Spatial Concentration of Poverty: New National Estimates

Lincoln Quillian, University of Wisconsin at Madison

This paper provides the first national estimates of the contribution of public housing to the spatial concentration of poverty in American cities. Past studies of the contribution of public housing to poverty concentration have focused on estimates for single cities, and have used regression methods that will tend to overstate the importance of public housing because they do not account for where residents would be living if not in public housing projects. Instead, I use a series of simple simulations that reallocate the residents of public housing to other types of tracts. The overall level of concentrated poverty it not strongly influenced by public housing because the number of persons resident in public housing is too small as a percentage of all housing. The contact with high-poverty neighborhoods experienced by (former) public housing residents, however, declines notably under some relocation scenarios.