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Chapter 8 Race, Place, and Poverty Revisited Michael A. Stoll N ot long ago, the lens viewing urban America displayed chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs. Popular funk bands of the 1970s, such as Parliament with their megahit “Chocolate Cities,” helped mold this understanding through musical lyrics that described American urban areas becoming darker and poorer while suburbs were emerging as white and rich (Avila 2004). U.S. cities were not, of course, always understood in these terms. The great black migrations from the South to the North in the early and mid-1900s, coupled with de jure and de facto discrimination that limited economic and residential opportunities, had tremendous effects on the socioeconomic and racial profiles of cities. This, in conjunction with the rapid suburbanization of mostly middle-income whites in the postwar period, left central cities with growing concentrations of poverty, especially minority poverty, and sealed the connection between race, place and poverty. Central cities were increasingly seen as black and poor, and suburbs were white and the main regions of population, employment, and economic growth. But a number of factors, including suburban sprawl and massive demographic changes, limited the strong association of cities with poverty and suburbs with white wealth. Sprawl continues to characterize much of metropolitan growth, and immigration, mostly from Latin America and Asia, now drives demographic change in the United States (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). For example, even in the recent decade, the Latino population increased a phenomenal 57.9 percent, from 22.4 million in 1990 to 35.3 million in 2000. In 2000, it represented about 13 percent of the population, up from about 6 percent in 1980, and much of this growth has been driven by immigration. Likewise, the Asian American population continues to grow at an impressive rate, making up about 1 percent of the U.S. population in 1980, but 4 percent in 2000 (Ong and Leung 2003). As a result of these changes, metropolitan America is likely to be more racially and ethnically diverse now than in the past. These changes, among others, have likely altered the colors of / 201 poverty across central cities and suburbs and raised questions about the role of place in influencing racial and ethnic differences in poverty. This chapter revisits several areas of the race, place, and poverty debate: the geography of race, place, and poverty; whether and how they have changed over recent decades; and how patterns and characteristics of place influence observed racial and ethnic differences in poverty. In earlier analyses of these questions, the notion of place was synonymous with the central city-suburban dichotomy for a variety of reasons, including the difficulty of obtaining quality data on place, and especially because of the perceived strong association between place, race and poverty. That is, as American cities declined in the late 1960s, central cities were increasingly characterized by density, minority poverty, crime, and urban problems generally, and newly growing suburban areas were characterized as pockets of new wealth, opportunity, and the absence of poverty and its associated problems . Thus, it was easy to conclude that cities were a source of, and reinforced, poverty, especially minority poverty, and that suburbs were centers of, and influenced , opportunity, especially for whites. The analysis here confirms the increasingly well-known idea that the central city–suburb dichotomy can be misleading, because of the increasing migration of poor and minority people to the suburbs, the economic decline of many innerring suburbs (Holzer and Stoll 2007), and the revitalization of parts of many central cites (Katz 2006). Thus, this categorization of places is of limited value in understanding the role of place in poverty in general, and racial differences in poverty in particular. The growing diversity of places within central cites, suburbs , and rural areas begs for a more local understanding of how place shapes and reinforces poverty and its racial ordering. However, even when we adopt a more fine-grained approach to categorizing places, we nevertheless see substantial segregation by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. Research has suggested many possible explanations for these patterns . They include micro factors such as neighborhood effects, schools, and networks , and macro factors such as housing market discrimination. Other chapters in this volume focus on the effect of social capital, networks, neighborhoods, and discrimination on racial differences in poverty. This chapter explores the impact of additional factors such as racial segregation and metropolitan decentralization, as well as less often discussed factors such as the geography of low-income housing . We begin...

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