Which Cities Segregate Poverty Most Completely?

Richard Florida worked with his colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute to measure and map the distribution of poverty across the country. Some of the most telling of Florida and company’s findings:

• As the map shows, the metros where the poor are the most segregated are mostly found along the Eastern Seaboard from New England to the Mid-Atlantic states, across the Midwest and the Great Lakes region, and in parts of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado.
• The large metros where the poor are most segregated are in the Midwest and the Northeast. Milwaukee has the highest level, followed by Hartford, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, Buffalo, Denver, Baltimore, and Memphis. Many of these are Rustbelt metros with large minority populations that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.
• When medium and smaller-sized metros are taken into account, many of the places with the most concentrated poverty turn out to be college towns, where the town-gown divide seems to be very real.

Florida goes on to point out a few pithy observations of the associations between variables, including “[the] poor face higher levels of segregation in larger, denser metros.”