Concentrated poverty remains a huge barrier to developing the potential of black and Hispanic youth in the United States.
Of all the issues raised by the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, perhaps the most intractable is the challenge of restoring opportunity to the high-poverty, high-crime, racially segregated neighborhoods where police and minority communities often collide most sharply.
Whatever else is done to rebuild trust or rethink policing practices, America will continue to face too many wrenching cases like these unless it can first temper crime in such places by providing more of the people who live in them with plausible chances to advance economically. The catch is that policymakers have long struggled to find sustainable, and replicable, ways to revive neighborhoods isolated by concentrated poverty.
In some ways, the search for "place-based" strategies to renew troubled communities traces back to Jane Addams and the late-19th-century settlement houses that worked to integrate European immigrants into American society during the Melting Pot era, as urban planner Elwood Hopkins notes in an insightful collection of papers on neighborhood revitalization published last week by the University of Southern California's Sol Price School of Public Policy.
[For more of this story, written by Ronald Brownstein, go to http://www.nationaljournal.com...opportunity-20141212]
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