You there and me here: how income separates us
Every day we realize that we are not living in the same place as only a few years ago.
I’m talking about the economic segregation that has been spiraling.
Here’s a new report from the Russell Sage Foundation which explains this. It concludes:
“By any of the measures we examine, segregation of families by income has grown
significantly in the last 40 years. The proportion of families living in poor or affluent
neighborhoods doubled from 15 percent to 31 percent and the proportion of families living in
middle-income neighborhoods declined from 65 percent to 44 percent”
How did Chicago rank?
Not so badly. No. Bad but far better than 19 other major urban areas. In terms of economic segregation, about one third of the city’s poor and affluent live in their own communities.
But let’s narrow our focus and look at what’s happened to Chicago block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Now we see that some communities have swung deeply in poverty and others have succumbed to just getting by. These figures comes from recent research by the Social Research Impact Center for the Heartland Alliance.
We talked about these figures at the workshop with the Grassroots Collaborative we held this week about the meaning of Chicago’s budget for communities and neighborhoods.
We talked, for example, about why it matters if there’s a mental health clinic serving Latinos in the Back of the Yards neighborhood where low incomes and other problems persist among Latinos. But the clinic serving latinos there was slated to be closed in the city’s budget.
That’s why you need to know about the city’s economy to report about what matters. You need to know the context before you can assume that 300 jobs downtown means anything in Bronzeville.
Here’s the paper from the Heartland Alliance’s research arm.
Poverty_CMW_111110
Written by Stephen on November 18, 2011
Filed Under: ETHNIC MEDIA
Tags: economic segregation, poverty
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