Tag: Economic Opportunity
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America’s Most Diverse Mixed Income Neighborhoods
In a nation increasingly divided by race and economic status, where our life prospects are increasingly de ned by the wealth of our zip codes, some American neighborhoods are bucking the trend. These neighborhoods—which we call America’s most diverse, mixed-income neighborhoods—have high levels of racial, ethnic and income diversity. This report identifies, maps and counts…
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City Report: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods
Today we’re releasing our latest CityReport: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods. In this report, we use Census data to identify those neighborhoods that have the highest levels of both racial/ethnic and income diversity among all urban neighborhoods in the US. We were motivated to take on this analysis, in part, because so much attention…
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Why integration matters
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…
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How segregation limits opportunity
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…
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The way we measure housing affordability is broken
This week, we’re running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what’s wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what “affordable” means. Tomorrow, we’ll look at an alternative measure, and on Wednesday, we’ll examine the particular challenges of understanding “affordability” for owner-occupied homes. Given…
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Less in Common
The essence of cities is bringing people—from all walks of life—together in one place. Social interaction and a robust mixing of people from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different incomes and interests is part of the secret sauce that enables progress and creates opportunity. This ease of exchange underpins important aspects of our personal…
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The Perils of Conflating Gentrification and Displacement: A Longer and Wonkier Critique of Governing’s Gentrification Issue
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…
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How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 2: Small Business)
We recently featured a post regarding how venture capital is associated with economic mobility. We know that these are strongly correlated—and that, if we are concerned with the ability of children today to obtain ‘The American Dream,’ we should be concerned with how to increase economic mobility. To understand more about how cities can increase…
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How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)
The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity project has spurred intense interest in the extent of economic mobility, measured by the likelihood that children born to low-income parents achieve higher economic status when they are adults. Their work shows a remarkable degree of geographic variation in intergenerational economic mobility.…
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How Governing got it wrong: The problem with confusing gentrification and displacement
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…
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New Findings on Economic Opportunity (that you should know)
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…
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Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place”
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…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 2)
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…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1)
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…
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Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago?
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…
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Ten More you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects. In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues. Here we offer ten more of the more interesting arguments that have been put forward as a follow up to our previous post, as well as…
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Lost in Place
Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. A close look at population change in our poorest urban neighborhoods over the past four decades shows that the concentration of poverty is growing and that gentrification is rare. While media attention often focuses on those few places that…
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Ten things you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects. In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues. Here we offer a baker’s dozen of some of the more interesting arguments that have been put forward. Daniel Kay Hertz explores the contradictions that emerge…
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City Report: Lost in Place
Here’s a summary of our latest CityReport: Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. Lost in Place traces the history of high poverty neighborhoods in large US cities, and constructs a new view of the process of neighborhood change. This article summarizes some of our key…
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Economic Opportunity
A key measure of economic success has to be whether we provide widely shared opportunities for economic advancement.