But the conventional wisdom is wrong. In the Washington metropolitan area, white and Hispanic poor people are widely scattered throughout the region's suburban neighborhoods, while many poor African Americans are living in highly concentrated pockets of poverty in the inner city. This kind of geographic concentration exacerbates the consequences of poverty. Poor education, joblessness, teen parenthood, discrimination and crime all reinforce one another, fueling a vicious cycle of poverty, inequality, isolation and social distress.
Black poverty is highly concentrated, while white and Hispanic poverty is highly dispersed.
In the Washington area's high-poverty neighborhoods, all of which are located within the District, almost half the adults lack a high school diploma, compared with only 15 percent for the metropolitan region as a whole. Moreover, as an increasing share of jobs migrate to the suburbs, poor African American communities in the central city are being cut off from access to economic opportunities. As relative newcomers to the Washington metropolitan area, poor Hispanics have thus far avoided this kind of concentrated, inner-city poverty. The region's total Hispanic population more than doubled between 1980 and 1990, to 213,000. But only about 5 percent of poor Hispanics live in high-poverty neighborhoods, and only 25 percent of the Hispanic poor live in the District at all.