Rich City, Poor City
With most big cities’s economies continuing to grow, the most pressing issue they face is how to connect their low-income communities to the opportunities that growth creates. New efforts developing in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Chicago show the many creative alternatives cities are exploring to respond to that challenge—and the obstacles they face.
From 2010 through 2015, all of the 100 largest metropolitan areas added jobs, and 98 of them increased their total economic output, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
But in most cities, that revival has largely from elsewhere, while struggling to place their own low-income kids on a track to obtain the education necessary to compete for those same jobs. Compounding the problem, longtime residents and commercial establishments in moderate- and low-income neighborhoods can find themselves pushed out by rising rents as developers pursue young white-collar workers flocking to urban environments.
