As they worked on assembling a new report on American poverty, a consortium of researchers fanned out across the U.S. to talk to people living in pockets of concentrated need—from rural Maine and the Lummi Nation of the Pacific Northwest to major cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Detroit. One of these site visits took the team to a neighborhood in San Jose, California, where Mexican immigrants struggle with tech-boom-fueled housing costs: Think $600 a month for a couch to sleep on, or $1,000 for a rented garage in the shadow of the riches of Silicon Valley.

The researchers asked one woman about the stark inequality gap that defined the area. “What is this ‘Silicon Valley’ you keep talking about?” she responded.

“We need to find ways to highlight that disparity,” says Nisha Patel, executive director of the U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty. The partnership formed a year and a half ago to develop new ideas for ways that governments and philanthropy can help the poor. Its 24 members—a kind of supergroup of poverty-focused economists, philanthropic experts, and public- and private-sector thinkers—are backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and run under the auspices of the Urban Institute. Their new report is called “Restoring the American Dream: What Would It Take to Dramatically Increase Mobility from Poverty?” It furthers the idea that too many Americans linger in poverty largely because they are trapped, literally—isolated in low-income communities where only other poor people surround them. And, statistically, few manage to escape.

[For more on this story by MICHAEL ANFT, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...e-than-money/551246/]