Racial/Ethnic Disparities

The Urban Institute's MetroTrends research team has created an interactive report card on racial and ethnic equity in the nation's top 100 metropolitan areas. A brief commentary by Margery Austin Turner, the Institute's vice president for research, accompanies the map.

Children are more likely to succeed if they have a stable home environment, adequate nutrition and the opportunity to get a good education. Unfortunately, nearly 50 years after the march on Washington, opportunity still has a racial dimension, argues Institute fellow Margaret Simms in this commentary for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

While much has been written about the decline of central cities, very little research has examined the problem in their suburbs. This report focuses on the suburbs of older industrial cities and how best to address the challenges they face. Using census data, literature review, and four in-depth case studies, the authors provide a detailed portrait of the underlying forces shaping distressed suburbs. It highlights a range of best practices used in case study cities for fostering growth and reducing poverty. These lessons can be instructive both to local leaders working to turn their cities around and to the federal policy makers supporting them.

This report updates and extends the Economic Security Index (ESI), an integrated measure of the share of Americans who experience large declines in their "available household income"-their household income after paying for medical care and servicing their financial debts. Americans are still coming to grips with the effects of the "Great Recession" on their economic security. Despite a number of valuable examinations of the downturn's effects, surprisingly little is known about the dynamic experiences of Americans as their economic standing has changed from year to year amid a turbulent economy. This report fills this gap.

Urban Institute scholars from diverse disciplines tackle a simple-to-state, hard-to-answer question: How can solutions to our national and state budget crises fit the facts about children in the United States? In their responses, the contributors wrestle with recent and approaching economic and demographic challenges in different ways and bring very different experiences to bear.

The increasing diversity of America's young children has important implications for Head Start and Early Head Start programs. This paper summarizes recent changes in the racial and ethnic composition of young children, particularly increases in Hispanic and Asian children, as well as shifts in where young children live, with some northeastern and Midwestern states losing children while southern and southwestern states are rapidly gaining. Based on these trends and recent Urban Institute research, the paper makes four recommendations about how local Head Start practitioners can best meet the needs of today's young children and their families.

Policies and strategies at all levels of government are increasingly associating educational outcomes with community planning and housing. Challenges remain for local officials and practitioners trying to align these policy areas, including persistent spatial inequity and rigid institutional silos. This report develops seven steps to link education and planning policy at the local level. The authors draw from a national scan of model activities, interviews with key experts and agency staff members, and the authors' experience working with local governing bodies. The report identifies practical solutions that encompass assessing the current educational environment, engaging the community, strategic planning and implementation of investment, and institutionalizing successful innovations.

This report assesses the employment experiences and economic well-being of African Americans age 50 and older. Despite progress over the past three decades, these African American workers continue to struggle in the workplace. Older African American men are less likely to work than Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, whereas older African American women are as likely to work as non-Hispanic whites and more likely to work than Hispanics. Fifty-plus African American men and women both earn less than their non-Hispanic white counterparts. The black-white earnings gap after age 50 narrowed between 1979 and 1999 but widened in the 2000s.