Neighborhood wealth tied to fiscal mobility

[Forkboy]

WASHINGTON - Researchers have found that being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African-American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults.

The Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project caused a stir two years ago by reporting that nearly half of African-American children born to middle-class parents in the 1950s and ’60s had fallen to a lower economic status as adults, a rate of downward mobility far higher than that for whites.

This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there. The impact of neighborhoods is greater than other factors in children’s backgrounds, Pew concludes.

Even as African-Americans have made gains in wealth and income, the report found, black children and white children are often raised in starkly different environments. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children, a disparity virtually unchanged from three decades prior.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2009/07/27/neighborhood_wealth_linked_to_economic_mobility_by_blacks/

[Hannah Bell]

1. duh. but kick.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

2. Good article. A question for you.

Do you think that the racial gap in neighborhoods referred to in the article is caused by institutional racism in the realty and banking industry or somewhat self imposed by African Americans being reluctant to leave communities to which they have historical ties? I personally think that both have contributed along with a great many other causes. Those two issues seem to be the greatest factors in communities where I work. Thanks.

David

[Forkboy]

3. I don't know.

It could also be that they feel uncomfortable moving into an affluent white neighborhood where they might be the only black family in the neighborhood. Hell, I'm white and I felt that way on Cape Cod. It could be all three, or something else entirely.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

4. Okay thanks for answering anyway.