As physical beings we have to in order to live, reside on physical land, to which, land is legally owned either by government and its agencies or by private individuals. In regards to either the government or to private individuals, the fact that they control the land, means that essentially whether you call it taxation, rent, tribute, or whatever, you as individual have to come up somehow with some sort of income to live upon some part of land, or you will be reduced to becoming a "squatter" by taking over a small portion of governmental or private land.
Not too surprisingly, in areas of a country, such as rural lands in which the land itself is often primarily owned by a few select individuals or organizations, in order to have gainful employment, you as a non-land owner are going to have to play the game per the rules of that given community, which typically means that the "income" that you earn there will only be enough to sustain you and your family, but not enough to provide you the velocity to escape from this particular economic prison.
This means, because of the gross inequitable distribution of land in rural areas, that, one way or another, many residents of such, will find a way to gravitate to cities, not because the land situation will be better in a city in the sense of ownership, but primarily because economic opportunity as well as the accouterments of city life will beckon people to come, for better or for worse. The above often means though that the new city residents without any material net worth, will take accommodations any way that they can, in any manner that will provide them with some sort of shelter.
This then essentially translates into cities becoming subdivided into specific blighted areas, overcrowding, and slums because the residents of such more often than not, don't own any real property and don't have the means to improve their living quarters because their income is often too low, too erratic, or non-existent.
The correction to poverty, whether for city dwellers or rural, can come from many means and directions, but, by far, the best solution to such endemic conditions, is a more equal distribution of land, property, and opportunity. For if a man does not own any land, is not permitted to hunt the land, or fish upon the waters surrounding the land, or to create things with his hands without a license or a permit on the land, to which, in all of these things he has been crowded out of in order to protect the status quo, than he is without the reliable means or wherewithal to sustain himself and his family.
While America prides itself on being perceived as the land of opportunity, the actual reality of it, is that America is a land of a huge divide, between the elite wealthy of the very few worth monetary sums unimaginable, against a massive underclass of those that basically are worth nothing, to which marketplace.org recently stated: "Around 50 percent of the US population, Zucman said, has zero net wealth." While there are a lot of reasons why this is so, the three most primary reasons are lack of land ownership, lack of capital, and lack of ownership of your own means of production.