Introduction: Special Issue on Poverty and Community Development

There is something systematic about the way that poor households are distributed across the U.S. landscape: poverty tends to concentrate in central city neighborhoods and remote rural communities. The highest poverty rates in 2000 were found in central counties and in remote rural counties, and the lowest poverty rates in the fringe counties of large metropolitan areas. (1) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Urban scholars have long recognized the importance of neighborhoods in shaping family poverty status and developmental outcomes for children and youth (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, & Aber, 1997). The role of rural communities in shaping social and family outcomes has also received scholarly attention (Fitchen, 1991; Duncan, 1999; Weber et al., 2005). As social policy in the United States moved from a needs-based entitlement strategy to an income support strategy for non-elderly populations conditional on participation in work, the importance of local community and regional context to the success of social policy in reducing poverty was increasingly recognized in both urban and rural areas (Jargowsky, 2003; Weber et al., 2002). The Rural Poverty Research Center (RPRC) of the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI), one of three area poverty research centers selected for federal support in 2002, focused its research agenda on understanding how local economic and social context affects poverty and conditions the effectiveness of alternative anti-poverty strategies and policies. (2) In 2004 and 2005, the RPRC and the four Regional Rural Development Centers co-sponsored regional poverty research conferences in Chicago, Illinois; Memphis, Tennessee; University Park, Pennsylvania; and Logan, Utah, in which regional researchers shared their current research on the causes and correlates of poverty and on policies to reduce poverty. (3) This special issue of Community Development draws on papers presented at these conferences. The six papers that comprise this issue contribute to both theoretical and empirical literature on poverty and community development, and outline a research agenda that would ground future poverty research more firmly in the experiences of rural communities and disadvantaged populations. We selected from among the unpublished papers presented at the four conferences and invited the authors to submit them to be considered for inclusion in a special issue of Community Development focusing on poverty in rural communities. Eight authors accepted our invitation, and submitted papers that were subjected to anonymous peer review. Five papers were ultimately accepted for publication in this special issue. We subsequently asked Jim Richardson of the National Rural Funders Collaborative to write an essay based on his presentation at the Western Rural Poverty Research Conference about grounding poverty research on the lived experience of rural communities. He engaged Jonathan London in co-authoring the final paper in this issue. The lead article in this issue, "Theories of Poverty and Anti-Poverty Programs in Community Development," by Ted Bradshaw, sets the stage for the other papers by outlining five competing theories of poverty and showing how each shapes policy discussions. Bradshaw begins with the observation that since "most rural community development efforts aim to relieve causes or symptoms of poverty" and since theories shape how programs are designed, it matters which theory drives policy. He identifies five "theories of poverty" that locate causes within (1) the individual (individual deficiencies and bad choices); (2) the relevant culture (dysfunctional subcultural norms); (3) political and economic structures (systematic barriers to opportunity); (4) geographic areas (disadvantages associated with particular places); and (5) a complex of cumulative and cyclical interactions between groups and individuals. Bradshaw identifies how various community development approaches are shaped by different theories and how each of the theories contributes to the overall process of poverty reduction. …