Architecture of Segregation: Civil Unrest, the Concentration of Poverty, and Public Policy
http://apps.tcf.org/architecture-of-segregation
Over the past year, scenes of civil unrest have played out in the deteriorating inner-ring suburb of Ferguson and the traditional urban ghetto of inner-city Baltimore. The proximate cause of these conflicts has been brutal interactions between police and unarmed black men, leading to protests that include violent confrontations with police, but no single incident can explain the full extent of the protesters’ rage and frustration. The riots and protests—which have occurred in racially-segregated, high-poverty neighborhoods, bringing back images of the “long, hot summers” of the 1960s—have sparked a national conversation about race, violence, and policing that is long overdue.
Something important, however, is being left out of this conversation: namely, that we are witnessing a nationwide return of concentrated poverty that is racial in nature, and that this expansion and continued existence of high-poverty ghettos and barrios is no accident. These neighborhoods are not the value-free outcome of the impartial workings of the housing market. Rather, in large measure, they are the inevitable and predictable consequences of deliberate policy choices....
High-poverty ghettos and barrios, after being a major concern in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, receded from the public consciousness. In the 1990s, economic trends and public policies aided the poor. The Earned Income Tax Credit reduced taxes for low-income Americans. The minimum wage was increased and unemployment dropped to 4 percent for a sustained period, leading to real wage increases. In this context, the number of persons living in high-poverty neighborhoods—defined as census tracts where the federal poverty rate was 40 percent or more—dropped by 25 percent, from 9.6 million to 7.2 million.
Since 2000, however, that progress has been squandered as there has been a rapid re-concentration of poverty. While the initial phases of this trend have been previously reported, the full extent of this development has been obscured because the available data from the American Community Survey (ACS) spanned pre- and post-recession years. The latest neighborhood-level data, however, allows us to see the full effect of the financial panic and the ensuing Great Recession on the concentration of poverty. (See Appendix A and B for an explanation of the methodology, definitions, and data used in this report.)