In the suburbs, as in the rest of the country, race and poverty are inextricably linked. There are prosperous African-American suburbs, like Maryland’s Prince George’s County (outside Washington), California’s Ladera Heights (Los Angeles) and New York’s Hillcrest (New York City). And yes, most poor suburban residents are white. But increasingly, the faces of suburban poverty are black and brown.
People of color in the suburbs are disproportionately likely to be poor and much more likely to live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty. The disparities are stark, Kneebone said: More than half of African Americans and Latinos live in poor suburban neighborhoods, compared with 23 percent of white suburbanites.
Case in point: Ferguson, where 25 percent of blacks live below the poverty line, compared with 11 percent of whites. (Ferguson is divided along strictly black/white lines; its Asian and Latino populations are quite small.) The median income for African Americans in Ferguson is $32,500, compared with $53,400 for whites. The black unemployment rate in Ferguson is 19 percent; white unemployment is 6.7 percent. In 1990, Ferguson was a majority-white enclave; today 67 percent of the population is African American. Its leadership structure, from City Hall to the police, remains overwhelmingly white.