Unpacking Neighborhood Level Economic Segregation
Tags: Economic Development, Urban Planning, Housing

According to this map, people climb the income ladder less frequently in the Deep South and in the Midwestern Rust Belt states. Children who grow up on the Great Plains, the Northeast, and the West enjoy much better chances of upward mobility. Things look particularly promising for children who grow up in poverty in North Dakota, which weathered the Great Recession exceptionally well due to its abundance of oil.

Why does place matter so much? Neighborhood segregation.

Source: Axel Drainville, flickr

In our cities today, race and income segregation tends to overlap with many other place-based inequalities — poverty, unemployment, crime, and housing quality and overcrowding. Before the rise of income segregation, neighborhoods hosted a mixture of incomes. Poor families living in relatively wealthy neighborhoods were able to afford housing while also sending their kids to highly resourced schools. During the Great Recession, poor neighborhoods only got poorer.

According to Dr. David Grusky who studies income inequality at Stanford, as the poor tend to live primarily with the poor and the rich tend to live with the rich, school funding has become concentrated to benefit wealthy children most. This widens the opportunity gap by allowing less support and fewer resources for poor children to improve their educational outcomes, graduate high school, and consider attending college.

How can we understand this issue within our cities?

In order to truly understand (or begin to understand) economic segregation at the city and neighborhood levels, we need to be able to answer:

Does economic segregation exist in this community?

If so, where are low-income and poor residents concentrated?

What are the primary economic burdens and opportunities in this community?

Does economic segregation affect school proficiency across the city?

Answering these questions means that city planners and decision makers can identify areas in need, focus on problems specific to those places, and align policies and initiatives with what the residents in that community really need. Since the challenges accompanying urban, suburban, and rural poverty vary, visualized data further empowers planners to fully understand the nature of the poverty in their own community or project area.

Does economic segregation exist in this community?

Identifying segregation requires the help of visualized data. Cities that struggle with economic segregation will notice a moderate to high Gini coefficient (measure of income inequality) for the city overall and lower Gini coefficients in the neighborhoods that qualify as low or high median income areas.

Like the rest of the South, Memphis youth who grow up in poverty struggle to rise to greater wealth. Of Memphis children whose parents earn at or below the federal poverty level, only 16 percent are likely to be considered middle-class (defined by the Pew Research Center as a median household income between $41,869 to $125,608 annually) and only 10 percent will break into the upper-income bracket (a median household income of over $125,608 annually) by age 30. The remaining 74 percent can expect to be ‘low-income’ or live in poverty, earning below $41,869 and $24,300 for a family of four respectively.

Income Inequality and Median Income for the City of Memphis, Tenn.