The most profound shift in American poverty is that it is beginning to concentrate in the suburbs
, the stereotypical image of American poverty still resembles the infamous Cabrini-Green Homes, a housing estate completed in 1962 near the heart of Chicago. It became overrun by gangs, drugs and violence. City police, in effect, ceded control. This popular conception of poverty remains largely urban, black and ghettoised. But the stereotype is outdated. The Cabrini-Green estate, which once housed 15,000 people, is no more. The city finished demolishing it in 2011.
Plot the rate of almost any social dysfunction—addiction, crime, infant mortality, joblessness or mental illness—and you invariably reproduce the same map. The cumulative effect of these overlapping disadvantages is worse than any individual one; concentrated poverty is more damaging than mere poverty.
Take Cleveland, Ohio, one of America’s poorest cities. Though nearby Detroit is often thought of as even poorer, half the children in Cleveland live in poverty, the highest rate of any large city in the country. In the city’s central district, where public housing for poor, black residents is still concentrated, the child-poverty rates are estimated at 80%. “It’s the same recurring story,” says Shanda Davis, a pastor and local activist in Cleveland’s Tremont neighbourhood.
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