A new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland says poverty is increasingly concentrated within certain neighborhoods – especially in the kinds of cities that dominate Ohio. For Ohio Public Radio, WKSU’s M.L. Schultze has more
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The new Federal Reserve study on poverty now lists four Ohio cities among the top 15 when it comes to the clustering of poverty by neighbhorhood. The four are Cleveland, Akron, Toledo and Columbus. And other Ohio cities – except Dayton – also saw a big jump in those clusters.
Dionissi Aliprantis headed the study and says solutions are complicated.
“Broadly speaking, there are kind of two options. You might try to encourage wealthier people to move into some neighborhoods that have been hit hard, without forcing everyone who’s already there out. The other is to make big investments in terms of education and maybe employment . ... But of course, there’s no easy answer, and some of these programs don’t always work how we think they’ll work.”
But Aliprantis says there may be some future optimism in the report. It’s based on numbers through 2010, and that timing helped make old industrial cities look especially bad. The picture may change as the Census Bureau collects new numbers that include the recovery of the manufacturing sector.
