"Where are Chicago's poor white neighborhoods?"

"Martha Victoria Diaz, a lawyer who grew up in Lake View during the late ‘70s and ‘80s, remembers the Chicago neighborhood as being fairly integrated. She remembers many Latino families like her own living on the block, as well as white households. But once the neighborhood began to gentrify, working class people of all races were displaced.

Martha says that got her thinking: It was easy to identify areas of Chicago where low-income Latinos live and, for that matter, where low-income African-Americans live, too. But where had all the white people gone?...

We began with U.S. Census data, which allowed us to drill down to individual census tracts across Chicago. After deciding on a methodology, we generated a map showing areas of high-poverty for each of the races... The data are striking. While it’s easy to identify swaths of African-American poverty, and to a lesser extent Latino poverty, Chicago has just two isolated census tracts of white poverty, both of which are tucked away near the lake in the Rogers Park neighborhood...

"I don’t know if we ever really had concentrated white poverty in Chicago, and part of that is because whites, as opposed to blacks and Latinos, have been able to live just about anywhere. And so part of it is more of a diffusion of poverty among white folks, compared to blacks and Latinos.

What we’ve seen since the 1970s ... is a shrinking of the white middle-income and lower-income families in the city of Chicago. So where we think they’ve gone — and this is based on data that we get from the U.S. Census — is that they’ve relocated probably outside the city and are living more in suburban areas...

I think that that contributes to our misunderstanding of poverty in general, our misunderstanding of welfare and social services, and I think it contributes to a kind of political conservatism because we can point to those “other people.” If we’re white, we can point to those other people (and think) “Something’s wrong with black people, something’s wrong with Latinos. White people — look, you don’t see any poor white neighborhoods.” But there are poor white people, there are lots of poor white people. But because they’re not visibly located in a single place, it doesn’t lend itself to our stigmatizing them.""

http://www.wbez.org/series/curious-city/where-are-chicagos-poor-white-neighborhoods-112639?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=FBWBEZ5742

Ahhhh I live in Lakeview and I assumed it had always been this way.

FB: A great, full exploration of this question by WBEZ (that also points to ways that economic inequality is experienced differently by different races)