What are poor neighborhoods called?

Asked by: Naomi Jaskolski  |  Last update: June 6, 2026
Score: 4.3/5 (16 votes)

Poor neighborhoods are called by various terms, including slums, ghettos, low-income areas, housing projects, shanty towns, or skid rows, with specific names often emerging locally like "favela" (Brazil) or "barrio" (Spanish-speaking), reflecting conditions from neglected public housing to informal settlements, though terms like "slum" carry negative connotations.

What is a poor neighborhood called?

The term "skid row" or "skid road," referring to an area of a city where people live who are "on the skids," derives from a logging term.

What is another name for a poor area?

"Slum area." Vocabulary.com Dictionary, Vocabulary.com, https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/slum area.

What is a poor community called?

The word “slum” is often used to describe informal settlements within cities that have inadequate housing and squalid, miserable living conditions.

How do you say a community is poor?

adjective

  1. deprived.
  2. disadvantaged.
  3. impoverished.
  4. poor.
  5. depressed.
  6. needy.
  7. indigent.
  8. unprivileged.

I went to the POOREST WHITE town in America (Beattyville, Kentucky)

27 related questions found

What is an undeveloped area called?

It's often called raw land, vacant or bare land, and is typically found in rural areas or on the outskirts of developed communities.

What do you call a poor suburb?

A slum is a derogatory term for a highly populated urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are primarily inhabited by impoverished people.

What is a fancy word for poor?

Poor, impecunious, impoverished, penniless refer to those lacking money. Poor is the simple term for the condition of lacking means to obtain the comforts of life: a very poor family. Impecunious often suggests that the poverty is a consequence of unwise habits: an impecunious actor.

What is the word for a bad society?

A dystopia ( lit. "bad place") is an imagined world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives. It is an imagined place (possibly state) in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.

What do you call an area where poor people live?

A slum is a poor area of a big city. A slum is usually overcrowded and dirty, a discouraging place to live. Some of a city's neighborhoods are fancy and full of wealthy people, while others are slums (and most are somewhere in between).

What is a word for slum area?

Synonyms: ghetto , hood (Slang), skid row, shanty town, the wrong side of the tracks (informal), poor neighborhood (US), poor area, tenement, run-down neighborhood (US), poverty-stricken neighborhood (US), the projects (US), housing projects, council estate (UK), favela.

How do you describe a poor environment?

Examples of poor environmental conditions include work environments where there is poor air quality, high or nuisance noise levels, extreme temperatures or uncontrolled biological hazards (e.g. blood or bodily fluids or infectious pathogens).

How do you describe low-income communities?

Low-Income Communities are groups of individuals living in geographic areas where the average household income falls below a recognised poverty threshold. These communities typically experience limited access to quality education, healthcare, housing, and employment opportunities.

What is a poor urban area called?

Slums are urban areas characterized by inadequate housing and poor living conditions, often inhabited by marginalized populations. As of 2018, approximately one billion people globally were estimated to live in slums, with a significant concentration in developing regions, particularly Eastern and Southeastern Asia.

How do you describe a bad neighborhood?

Besides high crime rate, illegal activities, which include taking drugs, drug dealing and prostitution, is also a characteristic of a bad neighborhood.

What is slang for poor?

broke (informal) destitute. down and out. down on one's luck (informal) hard up (informal)

How do you say "poor neighborhood"?

Synonyms for poor neighborhood in English

  1. slum.
  2. poor district.
  3. shantytown.
  4. skid row.
  5. shanty.
  6. inner-city.
  7. ghetto.
  8. slum area.

How do you say "lower class" in a nice way?

Synonyms of lower-class

  1. low.
  2. plebeian.
  3. proletarian.
  4. low-life.
  5. humble.
  6. lowly.
  7. poor.
  8. inferior.

What is a slum neighborhood?

A slum is a residential area with substandard housing that is poorly serviced and/or overcrowded, and therefore unhealthy, unsafe, and socially undesirable.

What term is used for poor urban areas?

The term “slum” is used in the Report to describe a wide range of low-income settlements and poor human living conditions. A simple definition of a slum would be “a heavily populated urban area characterised by substandard housing and squalor”.

What is a poverty neighborhood?

Low income neighborhoods are defined as areas characterized by materially deprived conditions, which often result in limited access to healthy food options and public transportation, leading to increased health risks such as higher BMIs and diabetes among residents.

What do you call disadvantaged groups?

Marginalized communities refer to groups of people who experience social, economic, and/or political exclusion or discrimination based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability, or religion.

What is another term for rural area?

back country, backwoods, boondocks, hinterland. a remote and undeveloped area. farming area, farmland. a rural area where farming is practiced. countryside.

What to say instead of underdeveloped?

Synonyms of underdeveloped

  • undeveloped.
  • backward.
  • embryonic.
  • early.
  • primordial.
  • primeval.
  • antiquated.
  • obsolete.