Socioeconomic mixing, in neighborhoods that are diverse in race, ethnicity and income, benefits everyone To some extent, we take for granted that integration and equal opportunity should be valued for their own sake. But its worth noting that achieving greater integration along both racial/ethnic and income dimensions is important to achieving more widespread prosperity and […]
Why integration matters Read More »
The more segregated an metro area is, the worse the economic prospects of the poor and people of color Our City Observatory report, Lost in Place, closely tracks the growth of concentrated poverty in the nation’s cities; this is particularly important because of the widespread evidence of the permanent damage high-poverty neighborhoods do to children
How segregation limits opportunity Read More »
It’s telling that Governing calls gentrification the “g-word”—it’s become almost impossible to talk about neighborhood revitalization without objections being raised almost any change amounts to gentrification. While we applaud the attempt to inject some rigor and precision into a debate that has been too often fueled by emotion and anecdote, Governing’s analysis serves only to
Here’s a quick quiz: Which of the following statements is true? a) Gentrification can be harmful because it causes displacement b) Gentrification is the same thing as displacement c) Gentrification is a totally different thing than displacement d) All of the above If the only studying you did was a reading of the latest series
How Governing got it wrong: The problem with confusing gentrification and displacement Read More »
Our recent report, Lost in Place, closely tracks the growth of concentrated poverty in the nation’s cities; this is particularly important because of the widespread evidence of the permanent damage high-poverty neighborhoods do to children of poor families. Two new studies shed additional light on the importance of economic and racial integration to the life
New Findings on Economic Opportunity (that you should know) Read More »
In this post, we’ll go over the data and mapping steps that were used to create our Lost In Place report on the concentration of poverty and the interactive web map. This post is one of several commentary posts that accompany the report, including an examination of how poverty has deepened. Data for our report
Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place” Read More »
Recently, we discussed the growth in the number of urban high-poverty neighborhoods, which we illustrated by examining the distribution of poverty rates among census tracts. This analysis showed that high poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in urban areas. Today we will use this distribution to discuss what few of us have directly experienced: extremely
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 2) Read More »
Many talk about poverty—its causes, its effects, and its possible remedies. There is literature on this issue from almost every social science, and no one can summarize it all in one blog post. However, there’s one aspect of our most recent report that I wanted to highlight: the deepening of poverty. Not only are we
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1) Read More »
One of the nation’s biggest health problems is the challenge of obesity: since the early 1960s the number of American’s who are obese has increased from about 13 percent to 35 percent. The problem is a complex, deep-seated one, and everything from our diet, to our inactive life-styles, to the built environment have been implicated
Where are the food deserts? Read More »
We recently released our latest report, Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. It speaks to a national trend that’s been largely ignored– that urban poor are being concentrated into poorer neighborhoods, and that those neighborhoods are increasing in number. We speak here about some of
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago? Read More »
