Changing Urban Populations: Regional Restructuring, Racial Polarization, and Poverty ConcentrationAbstractThe contexts for urban demographic change in the United States have led to sharper divisions in the growth prospects, diversity profiles, and economic structures across broad regions of the country as well as within metropolitan areas.1 Some of the worst consequences of these new demographic growth trends are borne by inner-city residents in selected parts of the Rustbelt and also in coastal areas that serve as ports of entry for the flow of immigrants that has accelerated over the course of the 1980s.The changing structure of the U.S. economy is increasingly concentrating poverty and unemployment among racial minorities in the inner cities and a growing number of suburban communities. Joblessness among African-American males, increasing teenage pregnancy and single-parent households, children in poverty and poor health, homelessness, welfare dependency, crime, drugs, gangs, and violence—these and related problems reduce national economic growth through the loss of human resources and labor productivity. Moreover, they diminish the quality of life throughout metropolitan areas. Many urban communities and their low-income residents must be brought back into the mainstream of American life with decent jobs, stable families, adequate health care, affordable housing, and accessible transportation. Understanding the changing population profiles of urban America, with its increasing number of immigrants and growing diversity imposed upon a background of unfortunate racial and income polarization, is a necessary first step in meeting the challenge of diversity. This overview provides a backdrop by focusing on the forces that shape key demographic trends across broad regions and in metropolitan areas and then shows how these trends have led to disparities in growth and decline, racial polarization, and poverty concentration. The disparities that now exist across the Nation's urban landscape have been strongly influenced by three elements (Frey, 1993; 1995a), discussed below. Changing Urban Populations: Regional Restructuring, Racial Polarization, and Poverty Concentration (*.pdf, 562 KB)
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