• Chandler West/for Sun-Times Media
  • Mayor Emanuel addresses business leaders downtown on Monday

Chicago is a shining example for the nation, Rahm Emanuel wants all to know. He told a receptive audience downtown Monday that the goals President Obama has for the country—more jobs, a vibrant economy benefiting all—are Chicago’s goals, too, but “the difference is, we are obviously getting them done.”

The president apparently agrees that his hometown is a model for America. You may recall that in December, he spoke in Washington about the nation’s “dangerous and growing inequality.” For children born in poverty in the U.S., the prospects of advancement are dim, he observed. He went on: “The idea that so many children are born into poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth is heartbreaking enough. But the idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own—that should offend all of us, and it should compel us to action.”

In 2000, nearly one in five Chicagoans—19.6 percent, or more than 556,000 people—were living in poverty. That’s not a statistic any major city could be proud of. A decade later, our poverty rate has increased, to 22.1 percent. (The poverty line for a single adult younger than 65 is $11,344.)

The plight of the residents of these neighborhoods should “offend all of us” and “compel us to action,” as the president said in his December speech. But these communities are neatly sequestered from most better-off Chicagoans—and from our distance, we’re not easily compelled to act. Most of these neighborhoods had dreadful poverty rates more than 40 years ago, and in these last four decades their poverty has only grown.

As in most low-income communities, children in Englewood are born preterm, of low weight, and to teens far more often than children in affluent areas. Here are birth rates per 1,000 teens in 2009, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health: citywide—57; Lincoln Park—2.1; Englewood—105.7.