Low Income Neighborhoods

While we have made a little progress towards Martin Luther King’s dream, there is still much work to be done.

By economic standards, black people in America are still being handed a check “marked ‘insufficient funds’”. “Middle-Class Black Families, in Low-Income Neighborhoods”, an article published in The New York Times, reports that “[even] among white and black families with similar incomes, white families are much more likely to live in good neighborhoods — with high-quality schools, day-care options, parks, playgrounds and transportation options.” Research shows that children in better neighborhoods are much more successful than children from poorer neighborhoods. There are a few explanations for this. Firstly, white families generally have more net worth

Thus, though a white family and black family may have the same income, the white family is statistically more likely to have more savings, allowing them to afford a house in a middle-class neighborhood. Secondly, people generally want to live with people similar to them. With the well-documented wage gap between whites and blacks, this means that otherwise well-off black families must move into lower-income neighborhoods. This brings us to the aforementioned wage gap. The wage gap between white workers and black workers has not only remained consistent, but also widened; 30 years ago, in 1983, the gap was 18.3 percent. In 2013, that gap had risen to 21.6 percent. The unemployment gap between white and black people has also remained consistent. The jobless rate of African Americans has remained between 2 and 2.5 times higher than that of whites for 40 years. These troubling numbers belie the progress that has been made, however. For example, while white newborns still have a higher life expectancy than black newborns, this gap has narrowed significantly. According to the Centers for Disease Control,