I think this might go back to the nasty practice of redlining, which defined the landscape for decades to come. Redlining was a tactic used by financial institutions to discriminate against people based on community demographics. It sets the conditions where you have a cycle of poverty that repeats, and this means the job opportunities remain scant in these areas.

I'm sure you've seen movies where people's biggest aspirations are to "get up outta the hood." People want to leave because it's a low opportunity, high crime area, and it's high crime because there is no opportunity. The banksters have created a bit of a feedback loop with selective lending.

Nowadays, individuals have credits scores. I don't know if the implementation of credit scores fully eliminated the redlining practice, or if it caused it to become more sophisticated. Below is an NPR video that speaks to housing segregation. It's sad when you have kids growing up in areas where the most successful role models might be drug dealers, pimps, or hoes. By role models, I mean people with the most money, which translates to opportunity in the minds of those who want to get their hands on it.

Extremely high crime neighborhoods pretty much force people to get a gun whether it's legal or not, either that or accept that on any given day, they can be murdered without a chance to save themselves. The same problem exists with poverty, you might not be able to afford to eat, but if you don't eat you're going to die. So people learn to live with the hunger pains for as long as they can, or they inflict pain on society to feed either themselves and or their families. It's survival of the fittest in the concrete jungles.