Many urban neighborhoods are places of concentrated poverty, and it's killing opportunity in the US.
American cities are growing, and as they grow, they're adding lots of high-poverty neighborhoods. Nearly three times as many "high-poverty" census tracts existed in 2010 as in 1970. That's unsettling on its face but even more so when you see the havoc a poor neighborhood can wreak on a resident's chances at a good life. Forget gentrification — this is a bigger problem.
The chart above tallies up the people living in these neighborhoods in 1970 and 2010. What it shows is that the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods — those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more — has roughly doubled since 1970. That's because these neighborhoods of concentrated poverty have a tendency to stay that way, even while new ones sprout up.
Tags: urban, unit 7 cities, housing, economic, poverty, place, socioeconomic, neighborhood.
Unit 1 Geography: Its nature and Perspectives
This article is about how Canada switched its census from being mandatory to voluntary, and how this has had many negative effects. By not having a mandatory census, Canada has saved the national government money, but in truth has really lost a lot. It is much harder to have accurate demographics for city planning, research purposes, and business marketing. Researchers are unable to tell the distribution of racial equality in neighborhoods, the demographics of neighborhoods, and are completley unable to track immagration. There is a voluntary census in place, but this produces much lower quality results, and is expensive to obtain this data.
This relates to the theme of how information such as census data is used, and through this article you are able to tell how important something like the census is to providing data for so many different oraganizations/people.
As much as Americans hate the Census, this article proves that it is an important governmental instrument. There are many in this nation that would probably desire a similar proposal. They should read this article before ever speaking on the subject again. A Census is nessacary to tell us about ourselves. How can a government formulate a public policy, if it does not know who lives within its borders?