Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been.” Michael Harrington made this observation in 1962, at the start of The Other America, his groundbreaking exploration of the misery hidden from the nation’s middle class. Half a century later, consider the geography of inequality. In 1970, about 15 percent of urban families lived in neighborhoods that were either extremely poor or extremely wealthy. That figure had risen to 34 percent by 2012. Among black Americans, the odds of escaping the poorest enclaves are grim: Four out of five black children growing up in such places have caregivers who were raised in similar neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the number of households within gated communities is up by more than half since 2001.
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