Children of different races and ethnicities, even living in the same metro area a few miles apart, are often growing up in neighborhoods with radically different opportunities to thrive, according to a new index of neighborhood features that compares data on all 73,000 census tracts in the country.
The project, the Child Opportunity Index (COI) 3.0, analyzes measures of opportunity across three domains: education, health and environment and social and economic, and ranks neighborhoods by a Child Opportunity Score ranging from 1-100.
An accompanying report finds that in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, children face significant inequities in opportunity.
The typical white child lives in a neighborhood with an opportunity score of 74 out of 100, whereas that score is 30 for Black children, and 33 for Hispanic children. The Index was recently released by the diversitydatakids.org project at Brandeis University.
Houston score
By design, across the entire U.S. the difference in the Child Opportunity Score between very low- and very high-opportunity neighborhoods is about 80 points. We find that in 25% of metro areas, the Child Opportunity Gap is at least 80 points, i.e., as wide as or wider than the difference between very low- and very high-opportunity neighborhoods across the entire nation. Houston has a score of 85… one of the highest/widest child opportunity gaps
History behind the gap
Historically, policies such as racial zoning, racial covenants, redlining, displacement through urban renewal and segregated public housing separated racial groups. These policies provided White families with access to higher opportunity neighborhoods, while shutting out many Black, immigrant, Hispanic and other minority families, forcing them into areas of concentrated poverty
Two challenges
The data included in the report shed light on two related challenges. The first: Metro areas can either share or hoard opportunity.
Take Detroit, Michigan, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, for example. These two cities, situated in vastly different parts of the country, have just about the same overall opportunity score: 57 and 56, respectively. But they have dramatically different inequities in the opportunity that typical children may experience: an 88-point gap between high- and low-opportunity neighborhoods in Detroit, compared to a 59-point gap in Fayetteville. In short, Fayetteville shares opportunity, whereas Detroit tends to hoard opportunity in select neighborhoods.
Second: Metro areas can either support or hinder equitable access to opportunity by race and ethnicity.
In the 100 largest metro areas, Black and Hispanic children almost universally live in lower opportunity neighborhoods than white and Asian children. But some inequities are much larger than others. In Milwaukee, there is a 74-point gap between the Opportunity Score that a typical white and Black child experiences and a 59-point gap between the typical white and Hispanic child. But in Madison, Wisconsin, there is only an 8-point gap between the neighborhoods of typical white and Black children, and a 9-point gap for white and Hispanic children.
“The data show us that the U.S. can provide children with rich opportunities to learn and grow, but that we’re not doing so equitably,” says Director Dr. Dolores Acevedo-Garcia, who is a professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. “These inequities, between high- and low-opportunity neighborhoods, and between children of different racial and ethnic groups, are neither natural nor random. They’re driven by systemic inequities such as high segregation and policies that enable opportunity hoarding. But we can close these inequities. The Child Opportunity Index points us to where we need to do more to improve opportunity for the highest-need children.”
Child Opportunity Impacts Life Expectancy
For a child, growing up in a neighborhood with low opportunity hurts them today and into their future. The researchers find that in the 100 largest metro areas, the difference in life expectancy for children who live in very high- versus very low-opportunity neighborhoods is 6 years — a difference of living to 82 years old versus only 76. In some metros, like Dayton, Ohio, that difference in life expectancy is as large as 10 years. Health conditions like obesity and diabetes in adulthood are strongly correlated with neighborhood opportunity during childhood, too.
Recommendations for Policymakers
The creators of the COI 3.0 offer recommendations for policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels to improve equitable access to neighborhood opportunity. Examples include:
Reduce child poverty via expansions to programs like the Child Tax Credit (CTC).
Increase families’ ability to access higher opportunity neighborhoods via zoning reform.
Increase children’s access to quality schools via school assignment reform.
Of the 100 largest metro areas in the country, the three with the highest overall Opportunity Scores are: Bridgeport, Conn. (88), San Jose, Calif. (87) and Boston, Mass. (86). The three with the lowest overall scores are: McAllen, Texas (6), Brownsville, Texas (9) and Visalia, Calif. (13).
The metro areas with the widest gaps between very high- and very low-opportunity neighborhoods are Milwaukee, Wis. (90), Cleveland, Ohio (88) and Detroit, Mich. (88). The three with the smallest gaps are Provo, Utah (32), Brownsville, Texas (34) and McAllen, Texas (34).
The metro areas with the widest gaps between white and Black children are: Milwaukee (74), Cleveland (62) and Los Angeles (61); and between white and Hispanic children are Los Angeles (59), Milwaukee (59) and Hartford, Conn. (55).
