Disparities between Pittsburgh neighborhoods persist. This project tries to understand why.

My mom also grew up in a poor, complicated household on Rochelle Street in Knoxville. She lived there from the 1950s until she married in the 80s. Her mother was widowed shortly after she was born. Her uncle, who moved in with my grandmother to help raise my mother and her siblings, worked in the steel mills until the day they shut down.

My dad, on the other hand, was born into an upper-income family and was raised in a large home off Tennyson Avenue in North Oakland. By the time my dad met my mom, his family had suffered numerous tragedies, including the murder of his father, that resulted in the loss of that family wealth.

I tell you these stories because the neighborhoods where we grow up matter far more than most of us probably believe. While I grew up poor, experienced significant abuse and lived in a house where neither parent had a college degree, I am white and got to grow up in a low-poverty, working-class neighborhood like Brookline. The lowest poverty neighborhoods are typically defined as those with less than 10% of their population living below the federal poverty line, and Brookline has been roughly low-poverty for the past 27 years.