Poverty and Urban Public Expenditures

Cities in the US bear a disproportionate responsibility for the public expenditures that grow out of poverty because they contain disproportionate numbers of the poor and because a substantial part of the public expenditures associated with poverty are financed from local resources. The research reported here estimates how large these poverty-related expenditures are and how the fiscal burdens differ for the populations of cities with high and low poverty rates. A major finding is that the largest poverty-related expenditure burdens come from indirect poverty expenditures-additional expenditures on police, fire, courts, general administrative functions-rather than from primary poverty functions like public welfare, health and hospitals.