Response to George C. Galster’s “Consequences From the Redistribution of Urban Poverty During the 1990s: A Cautionary Tale”

Abstract

Galster proposes that the reductions in the concentration of poverty in the United States in the 1990s may have unexpected negative consequences because of nonlinearities in the effect of neighborhood poverty on individual outcomes. Although the hypothesized effect is a theoretical possibility, there is far too much uncertainty in the functional form of neighborhood effects to have any confidence in Galster’s simulations based on coefficients from existing studies. Moreover, the hypothesized effects would apply to children and materialize over time, assuming that all else was equal. Yet, declining neighborhood poverty benefits both adults and children in myriad ways, so that the small hypothesized negative effects on the rates of various social problems, if they in fact exist, are likely to be swamped by the positive direct effects on children and their parents.