Recently, researchers Harvard and Brown, collaborating with the U.S. Census Bureau, have mapped the city of Chicago into incredibly small and detailed sections to illustrate the opportunity for upward mobility depending on where someone grew up. They called this the “Opportunity Atlas,” and the writers of this Chicago Tribune article reached a few conclusions from the data.
Firstly, and perhaps most relevant to the most recent readings we’ve discussed in class, is that there is a clear disparity between the percentage chance that a child who was born between 1978 and 1983 rose out of poverty between white and black children; a child raised in low-income black family “in the top 1 percent of tracts for mobility earned about $30,000 as adults on average, which is less than the $32,000 for whites born to poor families living in the worst 5 percent of tracts.”
Next, the article discussed how certain neighborhoods, particularly in the inner city, have poverty that is statistically nearly impossible to escape. This is shown by some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago continuing to be some of the poorest to this very day, while some people have moved out.
Another relevant takeaway is the lack of a positive effect on the local, poorer community in the Lincoln Park area, which has undergone gentrification. Although it has become one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation, according to the article, it has pushed out many poor families who have lived there for a long time, and the ones who stayed were not lifted out of poverty with the rest of the community who had moved in more recently.
The last pertinent takeaway to the course is how race, income, and place affect one’s chances of incarceration. As many know, across the country incarceration rates are significantly higher amongst black men than any other demographic group. In Cook County, where Chicago is located, 1 in 10 black males had been in prison at some point in their lives, as of 2010. This rate varies not only by race, but also by location within the Chicago area. Overall, however, this data does not attempt to demonstrate causation, but it certainly suggests that more research is deserved in studies like this.
