The Encyclopedia of Housing

Slums

Contributors: Norman Fainstein

Edited by: Andrew T. Carswell
Book Title: The Encyclopedia of Housing
Chapter Title: "Slums"
Pub. Date: 2012
Access Date: May 11, 2019
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.
City: Thousand Oaks
Print ISBN: 9781412989572
Online ISBN: 9781452218380
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218380.n234
Print pages: 684-685
© 2012 SAGE Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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© 2012 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

From about the middle of the 19th century to the present, city neighborhoods inhabited by low-income popu-
lations and usually characterized by physical dilapidation have been called slums. The word slum has never
been defined officially, even during the decades when “slum clearance” was an essential element of the U.S.
urban renewal program. Rather, the term has been used in a flexible manner, with local government agencies
specifying which places should be so labeled.

Slums are undesirable places, in part because of the attributes of their residents and in part because slums
are supposed to contribute to those attributes. Thus, slums have been identified as “breeding grounds” for
disease, crime, family deviance, unemployment, and poverty. While the United Nations speaks these days of
“improving the lives of slum dwellers,” and others describe “a planet of slums,” Americans prefer euphemisms
when describing their own cities and populations: neighborhoods of concentrated, or ghetto, poverty,Black
ghettos or immigrant barrios, or simply the inner or central city and, nowadays, old suburbs. (In fact, the new
metropolitan geography increasingly places poor residents in the suburban ring, while many urban core dis-
tricts have become gentrified.)

Slums need to be understood on two levels—objective and ideological. Objectively, slums represent a spatial
expression of social and economic inequality. People who are poor and different from dominant groups in
race, ethnicity, or religion are physically concentrated in particular city neighborhoods. The concentration usu-
ally involves the interaction of market-driven processes (households with low incomes can afford only the
cheapest accommodations in the most dilapidated areas) and sociopolitical processes (“undesirable” popula-
tions are prevented from living with dominant groups by means of discrimination and, often, violence).

The variability of the process of spatial concentration over time is noteworthy. For example, Italian and Jewish
immigrants were concentrated in slums early in the 20th century but later were dispersed across the urban
landscape. African Americans, in contrast, were relatively dispersed in the 19th century and became highly
segregated over the course of the 20th century. Today, poor Whites tend to live throughout the suburbs and
especially in peripheral metropolitan areas, in contrast to Blacks who are forced into the center and a limited
number of declining “inner” suburbs.

On the ideological level, the characteristics of people and places are blurred. People are labeled as slum
or ghetto residents and thereby stigmatized. Moreover, the processes that concentrate stigmatized popula-
tions and simultaneously create “desirable” places (long characterized as “the inner city” versus “suburbia”)
are obfuscated, so that responsibility is shifted from dominant social groups to the subordinate slum dwellers
themselves (now called ghetto poor,barrio poor, and the like).

The consequences of the concentration of poor people—now usually people of color—in slum areas is sig-
nificant. On the one hand, low-income populations weaken the fiscal base of municipal governments. In the
U.S. system, where municipalities assume the primary responsibility for providing public services, the result
is that low-income slum populations receive relatively inferior services, including inferior schooling. Their abil-
ity to escape poverty is accordingly reduced. On the other hand, advocates of slum clearance from the 19th
century until today have claimed that the physical dilapidation of slum neighborhoods, and especially large
public housing projects, perhaps even create poverty.

Given the now centuries-old confusion between people and place and the search for a “spatial fix” to the
social problem of inequality generated by capitalist dynamics, it should be no surprise that large debates in
the social sciences have centered on the importance of place in the cause and solution to the problem of
poverty. During the 1980s and 1990s, the debate tended to focus on whether there was an underclass locked
in place by its social isolation and the spatial mismatch between its location and where new jobs were devel-
oping.

Assertions of the evils of concentrated poverty and spatial mismatch, once taken as facts, have been severely
undermined. The 2000 and 2010 censuses showed significant spatial deconcentration of poverty (especially
Black poverty), along with its suburbanization to many of the places where “good jobs” were supposed to be
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located. Numerous empirical studies failed to detect much evidence for spatial mismatches as explanations
of poverty and unemployment. Perhaps most damning to the prevailing wisdom, massive immigration repop-
ulated many old urban centers with low-skilled workers whose labor was much in demand. Thus, theories of
spatial mismatch and a Black underclass largely disappeared as the 21st century rolled out.

But the idea of spatial causality for economic inequality lived on in public policy and the policy research it
spawned. Until the collapse of the housing market bubble in 2008, much effort was devoted by federal and
municipal governments to the razing of public housing in the name of helping the poor “escape” from their
impoverished ghettoes, of helping them “move to opportunity” and even to home-ownership. The results for
poor people themselves of the so-called move to opportunity have proven to be mixed at best, while all of
the gains in low-income homeownership were effectively lost by 2011. The certain result of the latest effort to
clear the slums in the guise of helping the poor was to destroy what remained of public housing nearly every-
where in America (and not coincidentally, to open up large centrally located and waterfront tracts to private
investment and gentrification).

The exception was New York City, where the majority of residents and government officials apparently be-
lieved that public housing could and should be physically maintained and where there are years-long waiting
lists to live in places that other municipalities (notably Chicago) made into slums requiring elimination.

Norman Fainstein
http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452218380.n234
See also

• Public Housing
• Segregation

Further Readings

Davis, M. (2007). Planet of slums. London, UK: Verso.

De Souza, X., Popkin, S. J., & Goering, J. (2010). Moving to opportunity: The story of an American program
to fight ghetto poverty. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Gelfand, M. I. (1975). A nation of cities: The federal government and urban America, 1933–65. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Goetz, E. G. (2003). Clearing the way: Deconcentrating the poor in urban America. Washington, DC: Urban
Institute Press.
Jargowsky, P. A. (1998). Poverty and place: Ghettos, barrios and the American city. New York, NY: Russell
Sage Foundation.
O'Connor, A. (2002). Poverty knowledge: Social science, social policy and the poor in twentieth century US
history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Riis, J. A. (1902). The battle with the slums. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Ward, D. (1989). Poverty, ethnicity and the American city, 1940–1925: Changing conceptions of the slum and
the ghetto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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