Tracking the Urban Poor

For an international flavor, let me answer this question with records that I would consult here in the Netherlands:

• Church charity records
• Town poor administration records 
• Records of the colonies for benificence (work colonies where beggars were sentenced to work between 1818 and 1880)
• Criminal court records (vagrancy and begging were criminal offenses; poor people were more likely to commit crimes like tax fraud or theft)
• Prison records (same reason)
• Hearth tax records (even poor people had a hearth, they may have been exempt from the tax but would still be listed)
• Serf registers in manorial court records (serfs who bought or exchanged themselves free to start a new life elsewhere)

I am a bit boggled by the specification of ~urban~ poor.  Your example, from County records, is of a city-dweller's estate record.  The record allows the possibility that at least some of the debtors also lived in the city -- but other records would need to be found to distinguish between same-named persons (who might not have lived in any one place for long).

Hordes of State, County, Town, Township, Borough, Magisterial District and other records apply equally to the urban dweller as to the non-urban resident.  In this vein, the New England Town Warnngs Out are especially wonderful examples when they itemize ages and prior residences of family members.  But itemizing such records would be rather a huge task, already mostly done for us by the heftier genealogical research guides.

Regards,

Found "Poor Farm" listing on a census in Scott County, Missouri, but don't remember if it was 1870, 1880 or 1900. I'm sure that type of set-up was nationwide at one time. It's not an urban area, primarily agricultural.

• Jury duty? Reading through the Alabama Statutes published in 1897, I find no specific requirements for property or income, only honesty, impartiality, intelligence, integrity, character, and judgment. Would there have been an unwritten bias to exclude jurors who were poor? Jurors did have to be US citizens, though, so the pool wouldn't include immigrants.
• Naturalization records… Currently there are no property or income requirements for naturalization in the US. Some of my own Irish ancestors were illiterate working class and did file for naturalization. I wonder how much it cost to file papers… something to look into.
• Voting records 
• There was the whole poll tax thing… A $1.50 in 1897 is equivalent (according to online currency converter estimates) to about $40, which would be a big chunk out of the budget of an impoverished family today. What if an individual couldn't afford the poll tax?
• Records relating to “binding out” impoverished orphans (havng just finished reading the blog on this very topic!)
• Bail bonds
• And then all the different indigent records listed in EE (Poorhouse accounts, Commitments to the poor farm, Pauper rolls, Welfare files, Warnings out)