The Origins and Persistence of Neighborhood Inequality

How did place-based inequalities come to exist in the first place? In the Placing Prosperity: Neighborhoods and Life Expectancy in the New Orleans Metro three-chapter report, the Data Center explores neighborhoods change and racial disparities.

This second chapter looks to the past, using historical data on changes in neighborhood racial composition and socioeconomic status to explore the evolution of neighborhood inequality over time. Additionally, the second chapter shows how the evolution and durability of place-based inequality relates to stalled progress on racial equity, as documented across a broader range of systems-level measures in The Data Center’s 2018 Prosperity Index and as implied by the disparities covered in the previous chapter, which details currrent-day inequities in life expectancy.