Rising inequality plus segregation makes concentrated poverty unavoidable

Evidence

New interest in the consequences of residential segregation was stimulated by William Julius Wilson, who argued in 1987 that the growing social isolation of minorities (particularly African Americans) within neighborhoods of intensely concentrated poverty systematically lowered their chances for success in employment, marriage, and education, controlling for their individual and family characteristics. Although Wilson attributed the growing isolation of minorities to structural shifts in the US economy and the changing geography of employment, Massey and Denton (1993) showed that rising income inequality caused by these changes necessarily produces high concentrations of poverty when they occur to a highly segregated group, such as African Americans. Given rising income inequality and a high degree of racial residential segregation, the concentration of black poverty is mathematically inevitable. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2431

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The distinct mechanisms at work in the same phenomenon: two observational effects — selection (higher-SES families leaving), causation (neighborhood poverty causing dropout) — are distinguished, so a raw correlation cannot answer the causal question without a special design. This is the kind of subtle analytic point that resists one-sentence summary.
• SEED: Article angle: how a simple arithmetic fact (income inequality x segregation = concentrated poverty) gets read as a moral one — the difference between a demographic inevitability and a policy failure reveals who we blame for ghetto poverty.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2431
• XREF: connects to: Segregation produced massive inequality in Atlanta’s public recreational land per capita — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 178