Poor People in Poor Places: Local Opportunity Structures and Household Poverty*

Abstract Accounts of poverty generally fall into either “individualist” or “structuralist” camps. Often these are seen as irreconcilable and incompatible competing perspectives. This paper integrates individualist and structuralist accounts of poverty by examining the relationship between “person poverty” and “place poverty” in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan labor markets, using a multilevel framework. I fashion a general model of poverty production and allocation, drawing on the labor market ecology perspective. After a discussion of this perspective, I develop a multilevel framework for analyzing data from the 1990 Census PUMS‐L sample, STF‐3c, and other sources to show how compositional and contextual factors affect households' likelihoods of being in poverty. These multilevel models also allow us to estimate the degree to which labor market conditions influence the magnitude of household labor supply characteristics. Results suggest that both compositional and contextual factors contribute to the metro‐nonmetro difference in poverty rates, and that the effects of employment vary in accordance with labor market characteristics.