Paul Jargowsky is a fellow at The Century Foundation where he writes about inequality, the geographic concentration of poverty, and residential segregation by race and class. Other areas of interest include educational attainment and economic mobility. He is also a professor of public policy and the director of the Center for Urban Research and Urban Education at Rutgers University, as well as a senior research affiliate at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.
Jargowsky’s 1997 book, Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City, is a comprehensive examination of poverty at the neighborhood level in U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 1990. The Urban Affairs Association named Poverty and Place the “Best Book in Urban Affairs Published in 1997 or 1998.”
Jargowsky has also been involved in policy development at both the state and federal levels. In 1993, he was a Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services where he helped design the simulation model used for welfare reform planning. In 1986, he was the Project Director for the New York State Task Force on Poverty and Welfare Reform. The report of the Task Force, The New Social Contract: Rethinking the Nature and Purpose of Public Assistance, was influential in reshaping the welfare reform debate. Jargowsky has also been involved as a consultant and expert witness in fair housing and school desegregation litigation. Current areas of research include racial and economic segregation, the impacts of economic and spatial inequality, and the causes and consequences of exclusionary suburban development patterns.
