ZIP Code DestinyGrowing up6 of 19

Scene 6 of 19, Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes. Step 1 of 2, Before the points.

Census tracts with estimates for both groups

Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes

White children from low-income families reached a higher adult income rank than Black children from the same tract in 92.5% of 30,997 tracts

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Scenes

Where the comparison starts

  1. Life expectancy falls with each step toward more deprived neighborhoods
  2. Inside each New York borough, neighborhoods differ widely in life expectancy
  3. Home values set most of the deprivation ranking

Growing up

  1. Babies in more deprived counties are more often born small or early
  2. Test scores rise with county income, and gaps between groups remain inside districts
  3. Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes
  4. Former students of for-profit colleges earn the least a decade after entry

Adult life

  1. Where local jobs are scarce, residents hold better-paid jobs than the county offers
  2. Whether rent burden rises with deprivation depends on the comparison
  3. More deprived places have less traffic pollution nationally, but more within their own county
  4. Young adults report more distress than a decade ago, and the top income bracket the least at every age
  5. Smoking falls as income rises, while binge drinking climbs
  6. People rate their lives lowest in midlife, while stress declines with age

Reading the patterns

  1. The most deprived places usually stand farther from the national value than the least deprived
  2. Neighborhoods a few kilometers apart can differ by years of life expectancy
  3. Most differences in life expectancy lie inside counties, not between them
  4. Neighborhood types line up on outcomes but blur into one another
  5. Mobility beyond what census measures predict clusters by region
  6. These comparisons describe places, not what moving would do

Read the bookExplore the figuresMethods

Black and white children raised in the same neighborhood reach different adult incomes

Scene 6 of 19, step 1 of 2: Before the points. Census tracts with estimates for both groups.

What to say

The children were born in 1978 to 1983 and their incomes were measured in their thirties. Sharing a tract and a parental income level removes the differences between neighborhoods; it does not remove differences within families or within tracts.

About the chart

White children from low-income families reached a higher adult income rank than Black children from the same tract in 92.5% of 30,997 tracts

Most dots lie below the diagonal, which marks equal outcomes, and the markers fall further below it where white children do better. Dots are a random sample of 5,000 tracts drawn with a fixed seed from the 30,997 that have both estimates, and 35 tracts fall outside the plotted range; markers are population-weighted mean Black ranks in tenths of 336 counties ranked by their mean white rank, with 95% intervals from a bootstrap over states.

  • The dots are a random sample of 5,000 tracts inside the plotted range (seed 12345); every estimate in the text uses all 30,997 tracts. Tracts have a Black and a white estimate only where the Atlas has enough children of both groups, so they are not a sample of all tracts.
  • The markers average the tracts of each county that has at least 20 tracts with both estimates, because sorting tracts on the noisy white rank would flatten a line of tract means and widen the apparent contrast. Each tract is weighted by its 2010 census population, the nearest available stand-in for the number of children. Ranks are percentiles of the national distribution of household income for children born in 1978 to 1983, measured in 2014 to 2015. The Opportunity Atlas adds noise to its estimates to protect privacy and the staged values are never clipped, so a few fall outside 0 to 100.

Source

Opportunity Atlas tract outcomes, 2010 tracts, 1978-1983 birth cohorts; population-weighted (2010 tract population), modeled estimates

Open in Chapter 4.3, Race, income and mobilityThe chapter’s report, with every estimate and table

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