Interrelationship between poverty and the wildland-urban interface in metropolitan areas of the Southern US

This research disentangles the relationship between Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) area and poverty in metropolitan areas of the Southern US where urban sprawl has intensified and high-poverty regions have persisted. Results confirm that the enlargement of WUI areas increases urban poverty, which in turn causes WUI areas to expand. This finding validates the underlying hypothesis: expansion of the WUI excludes people in poor inner-city neighbourhoods from educational and economic opportunities that occur in suburban areas and the problems related to inner-city poverty push the rich away from the inner city.