Poverty and Economic Morphology of Ohio Central-City Neighborhoods

Abstract

The authors examine the relationship between poverty and economic activities in 24 selected industries in more than 100 neighborhoods in Ohio central cities. As expected, local economies deteriorated as poverty levels increased. However, the economic deterioration began much earlier, and was much more serious, than has been suggested in earlier ghetto studies. Furthermore, the decline in neighborhood jobs associated with the economic deterioration was massive. If neighborhood jobs are seen as a road to economic and social recovery for ghetto residents, the findings are very bleak indeed.

Race and residential accessibility to shopping and services

“…In addition, diminished levels of local-serving employment were found in a number of the industries studied, even when poverty levels were low (20 percent). Bingham and Zhang (1997) did not address the racial composition of the ZIP codes they studied. Immergluck (1999) did consider race as a possible explanation for reduced levels of commercial activity, but also only in the context of central-city neighborhoods.…”

“…However, only four recent pieces of research are closely related to our question. Bingham and Zhang (1997) examined the relationship between poverty and economic activities in 124 central-city ZIP codes (average size roughly 16,158 persons each) in seven Ohio metropolitan areas with populations of 2 million or more. Specifically, they sought to explain "how central-city neighborhood economies differ from one another as neighborhood poverty levels vary" (Bingham and Zhang 1997, 768).…”

“…Using Ohio ES-202 unemployment insurance data, Bingham and Zhang (1997) classified each ZIP code according to the percentage of its population in poverty and measured average earnings, average size of establishment, employment per 1,000 residents, and residents per establishment in each industry for each ZIP code. The results showed relationships between the presence and attributes of each industry and the poverty of ZIP code residents.…”

“…But since that time, many affluent black households have moved away from the central city and taken their spending power with them, contributing to a decline in local-serving retail and services in black inner-city neighborhoods. Most previous research on the distribution of local-serving retail and services examines only poor inner-city neighborhoods (Bingham and Zhang 1997;Chung and Myers 1999; Initiative for a Competitive Inner City [ICIC] and PriceWaterhouseCoopers 2000;Kunreuther 1973;MacDonald and Nelson 1991;Porter 1995;Rauch 1997;Weissbourd and Berry 1999), ignoring the growing number of affluent black neighborhoods. But in places such as Prince George's County, MD, and DeKalb County, GA, anecdotal evidence suggests that wealthy neighborhoods composed almost entirely of black households lack local-serving retail and services compared with similar white neighborhoods.…”

Do Drug Treatment Facilities Increase Clients’ Exposure to Potential Neighborhood-Level Triggers for Relapse? A Small-Area Assessment of a Large, Public Treatment System

“…As a neighborhood proxy, zip codes suffer several shortcomings, although they often appear in neighborhood analyses. 23,24 An important, additional limitation is the exclusion of homeless patients from the sample because of the unavailability of information on where they typically reside. Because treatment demand by homeless patients is likely to concentrate in disadvantaged areas, our estimates of treatment-home neighborhood differences do not necessarily imply an excess of treatment capacity in these areas.…”