The city of Syracuse has the highest concentration of black and Hispanic people in poverty of any of the top 100 metropolitan areas in the country, according to documents released by the Century Foundation.

The foundation recently released a report titled “Architecture of Segregation,” which discusses trends in poverty and segregation across the country. Out of the nation’s 100 biggest metropolitan areas, Syracuse ranked first for rates of extreme poverty among blacks and Hispanics.

“Syracuse recently made it to number one on a list on which we don’t even want our name to appear,” said Beth Broadway, CEO of nonprofit InterFaith Works of Central New York, in an email. “It is a damning testament to continued segregation in housing patterns for Central New York and to the challenges of a stalled employment sector.”

Paul Jargowsky, a public policy professor at Rutgers University and the author of the report, argued that extreme segregation in metropolitan areas leads to higher concentrations of poverty.

In Syracuse, nearly two-thirds of the black poor live in high-poverty neighborhoods, according to the report. Hispanic residents of the city face similar rates at about 60 percent. A 2014 report from CNY Fair Housing concluded that the Syracuse metropolitan area suffers from hyper-segregation.

Both these numbers are significantly higher than 15 years ago, when the rates of poverty were 43.4 percent for blacks and 49.3 percent for Hispanics, according to statistics from the United States Census Bureau.

According to the report, Detroit has the second-highest concentration of black poverty, with about 58 percent of its black population living in areas of extreme poverty. Philadelphia has the second largest population of Hispanics living in extreme poverty at 54 percent.

When compared to New York state, Syracuse does not fare well either.

Syracuse has lower graduation rates and bachelor degree holders than the New York state averages, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In addition, the mean household income in Syracuse is $19,121, while the mean household income for New York state is significantly higher at $58,003, according to the data.

“High-poverty neighborhoods produce high-poverty schools, and both the school and neighborhood contexts affect student achievement,” Jargowksy wrote in the report.

Jargowsky cited suburbanization as one of the main reasons for this new concentration in poverty in Syracuse. As middle class families moved out of the city, the poor “were left behind.”

He noted that significant segments of the population live in neighborhoods where there is little or no work, where there are underperforming schools and where there is little access to opportunity.

“As a community, we can do better than this,” Broadway said. “We can work, as the Land Bank and Fair Housing are doing, to improve the housing and neighborhoods of our city.”

Syracuse has made some important gains from its almost 40 percent poverty record a couple years ago, but Broadway said there’s still work to be done.

“We can break down the racial, ethnic, and economic divides that put us on this list to begin with,” Broadway said. “This awful designation can be our wake up call to engage, step up, and turn this around, together.”

Published on September 15, 2015 at 10:40 pm

Contact Hanna: hrhorvat@syr.edu