Why Do So Many Cities Have Poor East Ends?

From London to Paris, New York to Helsinki, poverty tends to cluster in the east. One study suggests a surprising reason why

The question is so obvious that you could easily forget to ask it: why do cities so often have a poor east side? To be clear, the mystery is not why every city has its leafy and its grubby sections – it costs money to live in nice places and to avoid nasty ones, which tends to group people into them by wealth. The mystery is why the poor groups always end up in the east.

Of course, the true picture is never neat nor simple, but by common consent a British-biased list of cities with poor eastern districts would include: London, Paris, New York, Toronto, Bristol, Manchester, Brighton and Hove, Oxford, Glasgow, Helsinki and Casablanca. No doubt there are some cities where poverty clusters in the west, but they seem harder to find; perhaps Delhi and Sydney?

The story seems easier to explain case by case. In London, for example, the docks are downstream in the east, and docks are rarely very salubrious in cities. For much of its history, the Thames also took the city’s waste, and smell, eastward. No wonder the poor wound up living there, you might say.

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