That's so interesting about the Section 8 vouchers but entirely believable. And I agree that the concentration of minority poverty causes huge problems (as it has seen the days when the U.S. started building housing projects).

The segregation in the Midwest surprises me less after I read Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland (linked to at the end of this piece) about how influential the Ku Klux Klan was in the region. I was startled by how deeply entrenched it became there and how much poison it spread not just about black residents but Jews and Catholics. We're only a couple of generations removed from that, so some of the toxicity had to have trickled down. The KKK spread so far, so fast, but it takes so long to ease those prejudices!