Ferguson: Gentrification and its discontents
Gentrification is pushing poor people of color out of major cities and into deeper inequality
The outpouring of anger on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown is partly a reaction to a long history of marginalization experienced by African-Americans, a process exacerbated by gentrification, argue experts. It should be no surprise, they say, that the latest racial flashpoint is not in the inner-city but in the modern suburb.
Ferguson is an outer suburb of St. Louis, the 16th fastest gentrifying city in the U.S., according to Census data. Not unrelatedly, a 2011 study by Brown University showed that the St. Louis metropolitan area was the 19th most segregated city in the U.S.
The social and economic inequality in the St. Louis area, which is divided along racial lines, is a microcosm of a problem playing out across the U.S.: Wealthier, typically white residents move into a previously economically disadvantaged neighborhood in the city, pricing out black families and displacing them to suburban outskirts, according to a recent Brookings report.
In 2008, the population of poor people in suburbs across the nation grew twice as fast as in city centers, the report said. By 2008, U.S. suburbs were home to the largest share of the nation’s poor.
In the St. Louis area, this type of population shift transformed the predominately white town of Ferguson into a largely black one.
In 1990, white residents of Ferguson comprised 73.8 percent of the total population, while those identified as black made up 25.1 percent, according to the U.S Census. By 2010, 29.3 percent of residents identified as white and 67.4 percent as black.
During that same 20-year period, the city's unemployment rate soared from less than 5 percent to over 13 percent.
By 2012, roughly 25 percent of residents lived below the federal poverty line ($23,492 for a family of four in 2012) and 44 percent fell below twice that level.
Meanwhile, in St. Louis proper, the white share of the population jumped from 28.1 percent in 2000, to 49.2 percent in Ferguson: Gentrification and its discontents | Al Jazeera America: