Cities & Communities
Suburbs are gentrifying—and communities are pushing back
In his 1997 book Poverty and Place, Paul Jargowsky reported a doubling in the 1970s and 1980s of the number of people living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty—where the poverty rate was 40 percent or more. Now, evidence drawn from Census 2000 indicates the trend reversed itself in the 1990s.
To probe this striking reversal, the Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy and Living Cities co-sponsored an in-depth public forum on May 19 at which Jargowsky and Urban Institute researcher Tom Kingsley reviewed new research on recent trends. Each scholar presented findings from new reports they have prepared, and panelists commented on the implications of these findings for policies to assist poor families and poor neighborhoods.
