You may notice that racial segregation indices were substantially higher than economic segregation indices. The answer is that, while across urban America there are almost twice as many poor whites as poor blacks, most poor whites do not live in poor neighborhoods. Metro Louisville s concentration of poverty exceeded the national averages. For one thing, nationally, if you are poor and white, the odds are three out of four that when your child goes off to the local neighborhood school, the great majority of your child s classmates will be middle-class children. But if you are poor and black, the odds are three out of four that your child s classmates will be overwhelmingly other poor children.
Poor whites are mainstreamed.
Poor blacks are ghettoized. There are many reasons for differences in these trends, but one of the contributing factors is the structure of local governance in different metropolitan areas. Big box regions have central cities that expand rapidly through annexation or have consolidated with their surrounding county. There is generally more social and economic mobility in big box regions than little box regions. Table 4 illustrates this phenomenon with regard to segregation of African Americans in the regional housing markets of big box and little box metropolitan areas.