Concentrated Poverty

Concentrated poverty in the wiki is the racially concentrated, geographically clustered form of poverty studied by Patrick Sharkey in Stuck in Place. It is more specific than the general Poverty page: Sharkey’s argument, cited via The New Urban Crisis, is that “neighborhood inequality is multi-generational, something that is passed down from parents to children in the same way that genetic background and financial wealth are transmitted across generations.” The disadvantage is treated as an inherited attribute of place — a multigenerational inheritance of neighborhood disadvantage rather than a transient income gap. (source: Patrick Sharkey)

The concept recurs across the wiki’s city-building and urban sources, where Sharkey is enlisted alongside Richard Florida’s The New Urban Crisis on the inheritance of neighborhood poverty. (source: Patrick Sharkey)

Context: “Concentrated poverty” is a term in urban sociology for neighborhoods where a high share of residents live below the poverty line, compounding individual hardship with disinvestment, weak schools, and limited opportunity. Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place (2013) is a landmark study arguing that the persistence of place — families remaining in the same disadvantaged neighborhoods across generations — drives durable racial inequality in the U.S.

Where this appears

• Stuck in Place — Sharkey’s study of racially concentrated, geographically clustered poverty (Kyle’s anti-library / cited source).
• Patrick Sharkey — the sociologist whose multigenerational-neighborhood-inequality thesis defines the concept here.