Most black households do not include a married couple or someone with a college degree. These are the families that have seen their incomes consistently decline compared with whites'. The problem, of course, runs much deeper than ethnicity. Broken homes, limited job skills, lack of education and low motivation levels feed the growing black underclass locally in much the way they do nationwide. Unlike other cities where despair is concentrated in huge sprawling ghettos, highways in Columbus quarter off poor, central-city areas, breaking up the appearance of poverty.
Mobility also plays a role in dispersing the poor.
They exist, though. Barbara Poppe, director of the Community Shelter Board, said nearly two-thirds of the chronically homeless are black. When I've talked to people who are homeless and of African-American descent, what they relate are stories of job and housing discrimination. They're not the stories you get from folks of the white race. They're people like Sandra Nelson, who moved to Columbus from Los Angeles more than six years ago and found herself homeless and broke with a disabled son to support.