Why all the social unrest?

Because we, through very bad public policy and a slavish devotion to create low-resource neighborhoods, made it so.

Read this from Paul A. Jawgorsky, professor of public policy at Rutgers University. Boiled down

• The number of people living in high-poverty ghettos, barrios, and slums has nearly doubled since 2000, rising from 7.2 million to 13.8 million. 
• These increases were well under way before the Great Recession began.
• Poverty became more concentrated—more than one in four of the black poor and nearly one in six of the Hispanic poor lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, compared to one in thirteen of the white poor. 
• To make matters worse, poor children are more likely to reside in high-poverty neighborhoods than poor adults. 
• The fastest growth in black concentration of poverty (12.6 percentage points) since 2000 was not in the largest cities, but in metropolitan areas with 500,000 to 1 million persons.

This, from the Washington Post, also adds to the discussion. And thank you, Leftover, for the links. Here’s a small part of Jargowsky’s solution:

…we have to try to stabilize low-income areas, improve inner-city schools, and expand economic opportunities for those currently living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And perhaps more importantly, we have to find a way to stop creating so many high-poverty neighborhoods in the first place. We must work to change the development paradigm that creates high-poverty neighborhoods.