Duration As A Problem Of Poverty In The United States

Social theorists throughout history have rarely talked about poverty as such, but nonetheless their insights into the economic ordering and structure of society offer valuable ideas for understanding poverty. Poverty is a type of social condition which is characterized by the lack of resources necessary for basic survival or necessary to meet a certain minimum level of living standards expected for the place where one lives. The income level that determines poverty is different from place to place, so social scientists believe that it is best defined by conditions of existence, like lack of access to food, clothing, and shelter. People in poverty typically experience persistent hunger or starvation, inadequate or absent education and health care, and are usually alienated from mainstream society. Duration is important, because temporary deprivations (like those experienced by the victims of catastrophes) are not enough to constitute ‘poverty’. Poverty is defined, then, on the existence of a pattern of deprivation, rather than by the deprivation itself. For several decades, poverty has been concentrated in distressed areas of inner cities and, isolated and declining rural areas. Historically, that is where the challenges of poverty have been most pronounced. Due to recessions in 2000s, the poor population in suburbs started growing faster, more than twice the pace of growth in urban areas, such as cities, and rural areas. As suburban poverty grew rapidly in the 2000s, it also moved beyond older, inner-ring suburbs that have long struggled with poverty alongside central cities.

Although shifting housing dynamics reflect suburbanization of poverty, structural factors, which structural functionalists and conflict theorists utilize to provide different explanations of their theories, also contribute to this pattern