Neighborhoods with Concentrated Poverty

Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and The Century Foundation discussion on the long-term and devastating impact of growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods has on children, with leading experts Paul Jargowsky (professor, Rutgers University and Century Foundation Fellow) and Patrick Sharkey (professor, New York University). They will be joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic and Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. EPI Research Associate Richard Rothstein will moderate. In 1987, William Julius Wilson transformed urban sociology by showing that when urban jobs disappeared, "truly disadvantaged" children growing up in concentrated poverty had little chance to overcome obstacles to their success. Now, a quarter century later, two social scientists have shown that these obstacles are even more serious than Wilson could know. Patrick Sharkey, in his 2013 book Stuck in Place, found that for African Americans in particular, there is little mobility out of truly disadvantaged neighborhoods -- if parents grew up in high poverty neighborhoods, their children are likely to have the same debilitating experience. Paul Jargowsky, in his report for The Century Foundation, Concentration of Poverty in the New Millennium, has found that despite significant gains during the 1990s, the number of high-poverty census tracts has increased by 50 percent since 2000, resulting in more Americans than ever before living in such neighborhoods.