Despite their ubiquity in the media, gentrifying neighborhoods that evolve over time from low-income to well-off are quite rare. It is far, far more common that once-poor neighborhoods stay that way over time — or, worse, that they grow poorer.
Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi illustrate this plainly in a new City Observatory analysis tracking the persistence of poverty over the last four decades in the 51 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Back in 1970, there were 1,100 high-poverty Census tracts in the nation's largest cities (these are places where the poverty rate tops 30 percent).
By 2010, a mere fraction of those same Census tracts — about 100 of them in all — had poverty rates that had fallen below the national average.
The overwhelmingly majority of these urban neighborhoods that were poor in 1970 have not seen new condo construction, or population growth or socioeonomic change in the years since then. They have seen, rather, persistent poverty, and the lingering disadvantages that come with it.
[For more of this story, written by Emily Badger, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...re-stuck-in-poverty/]
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