Author: Sujata Gupta / Source: Science News
Chicago’s mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot pledged in her victory speech on April 2 to “make Chicago a place where your zip code doesn’t determine your destiny.
” But turning that pledge into reality will require addressing more than poverty, according to a study that followed the lives of thousands of children in the city.Kids from poor neighborhoods that are beset by high rates of violence, incarceration and lead exposure earn less money, on average, in adulthood than equally poor children from less hazardous neighborhoods, researchers found. Children from these grittier neighborhoods are also more likely to become pregnant as teenagers or to be jailed in their 20s or 30s as children from less “toxic” communities, the team reports April 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“One thing that’s particularly painful about poverty right now is you’re getting hit from all these different angles,” from higher local crime and violence statistics to more environmental contaminants like lead, says study coauthor Robert Manduca, a sociologist at Harvard University.
Both black and white children who grew up in these toxic communities suffered the long-term effects. But, citywide, black children were more exposed to the hazards than white. Chicago’s neighborhoods remain largely segregated, and predominately black neighborhoods tend to have higher crime and pollution levels, on average, than white neighborhoods, the team says.
In particular, the…
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