Boston's segregation and racial division has had a widespread and unfathomable impact on the city's Hispanic residents who live in low opportunity neighborhoods and have very little access to healthy development resources.

Kansas City, Birmingham, Boston, Nashville, Cincinnati, Louisville, Milwaukee, Detroit and Cleveland are among the nation's most segregated metro areas, and the visible racial division is indicative of housing discrimination and impacts communities of color. Boston, alone, is the only region where segregation has affected the Hispanic population more than the black community.

According to report published on segregation in major cities, separating black people from the rest of society is the "product of explicit public policy," while the ghettoization of Hispanics is merely indicative of traditional patterns of ethnic immigration and migration.

The report asserts that socioeconomic and racial segregation often goes hand in hand, and this is true of Boston and other cities across the country. In Boston, Hispanic and black families are more likely than their white counterparts to live in higher poverty neighborhoods and be low income earners. Also, white households typically earn $79,730 annually, the median for a typical Hispanic household earns less than half each year, at $39,810, which the largest gap seen of all metro cities is observed.

According to the Census Bureau, 17.1 percent of Boston's population is Hispanic. Approximately 26.1 percent of Hispanics metro area respondents live in poverty, compared to just 6.8 percent of white metro area residents. The two non-white zip codes house just 1 percent of Boston's residents, yet nearly 10 percent of Boston's Hispanic residents live in the area.

The investigations into segregation in Boston and across the nation suggest that residential racial segregation promote poverty and produce inferior education outcomes. Researchers confirmed that individuals living in those zip codes have lower educational attainment rates and greater disparities, compared to white residents' education levels in nearby zip codes.

According to data, opportunities for Hispanic and African-American children in Boston are abysmal, and there are high percentages of children living in poverty. Nearly 6 in 10 African-American and Hispanic children in Boston live in neighborhoods with very low access to healthy development resources.

Additionally, children of color use community assets far less, they have increased exposure to violence and trauma, and they're more likely to change their residence more than twice in their lifetimes, which can be detrimental to a child's health. Also, Boston's waste container lots and junk yards are concentrated in communities of color. While similar inequalities exist in other areas, they just appear to be most dramatic in Boston, according to researchers. Widespread low opportunity neighborhoods can make addressing this problem more difficult.

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