America prides itself as being a rich country. It is, if you are wealthy. For the rest it isn't an easy road to hoe. Just look at the support for the OWS movement. More concerning is that America truly has fairly widespread poverty - and lots of it.
A new report from the Brookings Institution, “The Re-emergence of Concentrated Poverty,” delivers more bad news.
After declining in the 1990s, the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods — where at least 40 percent of individuals live below the poverty line — rose by one-third from 2000 to 2005–09 … The slower economic growth of the 2000s, followed by the worst downturn in decades, led to increases in neighborhoods of extreme poverty once again throughout the nation, particularly in suburban and small metropolitan communities and in the Midwest.
The growth of high-poverty clusters is distressing, no matter how one strives to recrunch the data. Concentrated poverty breeds on itself — schools deteriorate, businesses move away, crime rises, creating a negative feedback loop that makes it ever more difficult to restart economic growth.
The Brookings report illuminates the changing face of poverty in America. Residents of the new extreme-poverty neighborhoods are more likely to be white and less likely to be Latino than a decade ago. Poverty is increasingly a suburban phenomenon; “new clusters of low-income neighborhoods have emerged beyond the urban core in many of the nation’s largest metro areas.”
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