Concentrations of Poverty and Distressed Neighbourhoods in Canada

This paper examines two related but distinct phenomena in Canada: 1) The tendency for certain neighbourhoods to be disproportionately income poor and to account for a substantial share of total poverty within the urban areas containing them. 2) The extent to which certain neighbourhoods, whether or not they have high rates of income poverty, suffer from multiple indicators of social distress including high proportions of children growing up in lone parent families, low levels of full-time school attendance among young people, high levels of dependence on government transfer payments as a source of income and low rates of year-round full-time adult male employment.