Poverty and Planning

As the top 1% in the United States become richer and richer, more and more individuals are slipping into poverty. In their chapter Poverty, Social Rights, and the Quality of Citizenship, Roger Lawson and William Julius Wilson describe the “new poverty” arising from Reagan and Bush era trickle down economics. This “new poverty” is a more pervasive and seemingly inescapable inequality characterized by, “ ‘changes in the size and composition of economically marginal groups, the crystallization of racial cleavages among them, a downward turn in their life chances, and an increase in their social and political isolation’”(151). Just like capital, poverty can also be spatially fixed. Through redlining and other zoning practices, planners are responsible for the spatial fix of poverty. When Lawson and Wilson were writing, poverty was concentrated in inner city ghettos. Efforts of poverty deconcentration during the Clinton era have led to more of the same problem. Now instead of poverty concentrated solely in the inner city, poverty is also starting to concentrate in the suburbs. For example, in Chicago, there are more New Urbanist neighborhoods in the city and more areas of poverty in the inner ring suburbs. These suburbs may not have as many resources as the city to alleviate this poverty.