Reconsidering Deinstitutionalization: The Relevance of Space and the Poverty Threshold for the Presence of Organizational Resources

Cited by several proceeding works as a challenge to a widely supported theory of inner city ghetto deinstitutionalization presented by William Julius Wilson and others, the authors quantitatively tested the proposition that poverty inhibits neighborhood organizational resources.

Re-examining their findings using disaggregated data and adjusting for non-linearity, we find evidence in support of both their findings as well as Wilson's original hypotheses. While poverty is in fact positively associated with organizational density for low-poverty neighborhoods, this effect reverses and becomes negative for high-poverty neighborhoods. Moreover, the effect of poverty within poor, inner city urban neighborhoods is universally negative.