  Decades of economic decline have led to areas of increased deprivation in a
number of U.S. inner cities, which can be linked to adverse health and other
outcomes. Yet the calculation of a single "deprivation" index, which has
received wide application in Britain and elsewhere in the world, involves a
choice of variables and methods that have not been directly compared in the
American context. This study creates four related measures--using two sets of
variables and two weighting schemes--to create such indices for block groups in
Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. After examining the indices'
similarities, we then map concentrations of high deprivation in each city and
analyze their relationships to income, racial makeup, and transportation usage.
Overall, we find certain measures to have higher correlations than others, but
that all show deprivation to be linked with lower incomes and a higher nonwhite
population.
