New York Times, October 17, 2015, available here

Racial discrimination in housing remains pervasive and well entrenched, and governments at all levels bear a heavy share of the blame. Despite paying lip service to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which required states and localities that receive federal money to try to overcome historical patterns of racial isolation, elected officials have often reinforced segregation through a range of policies. Among the most pernicious of these is the practice of building subsidized housing mainly in existing ghettos instead of in areas that offer low- and moderate-income families access to safe neighborhoods, good jobs and schools that allow their children to thrive.

New York Times, Sept. 15, 2015, available here

Americans commonly — and mistakenly — believe that well-to-do black people no longer face the kind of discrimination that prevents them from living anywhere they can afford. But a federal housing discrimination complaint filed last week by the National Fair Housing Alliance shows that this toxic problem is very much with us, nearly 50 years after Congress outlawed housing discrimination in the Fair Housing Act.

Jonathan Rothwell, Brooking's Institute, May 6, 2015, available here

Neighborhoods remain the crucible of social life, even in the internet age. Children do not stream lectures — they go to school. They play together in parks and homes, not over Skype. Crime and fear of crime are experienced locally, as is the police response to it. But wide income gaps and America’s legacy of racial segregation result in wide differences between neighborhoods on a range of measures. Two major new studies from Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren show that neighborhoods matter not only for daily life, but for the life chances of the children raised there.

Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, Aug. 9, 2015, available here

The number of people living in high-poverty areas—defined as census tracts where 40 percent or more of families have income levels below the federal poverty threshold—nearly doubled between 2000 and 2013, to 13.8 million from 7.2 million, according to a new analysis of census data by Paul Jargowsky, a public-policy professor at Rutgers University-Camden and a fellow at The Century Foundation. That’s the highest number of Americans living in high-poverty neighborhoods ever recorded.

Binyamin Appelbaum, New York Times, July 7, 2015, available here.

Jeanne L. Reid and Sharon Lynn Kagan, The Century Foundation and PRRAC, April 2015, available here

"A formidable obstacle faced by preschool programs that seek to serve socioeconomically and racially diverse children is the prevalence of neighborhood segregation. Because many parents prefer to send their children to neighborhood programs, early education programs often reflect neighborhood housing patterns that result in high levels of segregation by income and race. Moreover, the number of high-minority, high-poverty neighborhoods is rising, with young children being the most likely age group to live in segregated neighborhoods. An analysis of 384 metropolitan areas across the country found that many children who are three to five years old reside in neighborhoods with levels of racial and economic segregation that are very high, and higher than for older children."

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