Racialized Poverty in America has Nearly Doubled in 21st Century

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/10/racialized-poverty-america-has-nearly-doubled-21st-century



New report finds mid-sized cities like Detroit and Milwaukee are ground zero for dramatic rise in segregation

Racialized Poverty in America has Nearly Doubled in 21st Century
Sarah Lazare
Monday, August 10, 2015

Discriminatory housing, zoning, and other policy choices are driving the dramatic rise of racialized poverty and segregation across the United States, with the number of people residing in low-income "ghettos, barrios, and slums" nearly doubling in the 21st century alone, a new report finds.

Architecture of Segregation, authored by the Century Foundation fellow Paul Jargowsky, concludes that midsized cities of 500,000 to 1 million people like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Cleveland are ground zero for the rapid concentration of black poverty.

Poverty is becoming dramatically more concentrated, as "more than one in four of the black poor and nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, compared to one in thirteen of the white poor," notes Jargowsky, who is also a professor of public policy at Rutgers University.

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These trends cannot be attributed solely to the Great Recession, Jargowsky argues, as they were established by policy choices, implemented well before 2008, that drove the "rampant suburban and exurban development" behind today's segregation.