Poverty worsening in Hub, study says

Poverty there is fueled by unemployment and low educational attainment, the study found.

“We no longer have conditions for the American dream; that actually does not exist anymore,’’ said Tiziana Dearing, executive director of the antipoverty organization Boston Rising, who had not read the report. “It is, in fact, harder now than it used to be.’’

In 1990, 24 percent of African-American children across the city lived in poverty. Nearly two decades later, that figure has risen to 35 percent, the study indicated.

The report, which found that poverty citywide remained constant in the past two decades, confirms recent studies by the US Census Bureau and the Brookings Institute finding that despite substantial progress against concentrated poverty during the 1990s, much of those gains have been erased in the turbulent 2000s.

The report ties Boston to a global trend linking race, class, and income disparities. It also illustrates the toll exacted by the depressed economy in extremely poor communities plagued by inadequate health care, lack of jobs, and persistent crime.

National policies have not been kind to families on the lower rungs of the economic ladder or to industrial workers, their jobs automated or sent offshore, officials at the foundation said.

“Boston is a full participant in those trends,’’ said Paul Grogan, the Boston Foundation’s president. “We have succeeded in building a knowledge economy. It’s an economy that richly rewards those with the right education credentials and harshly punishes those without those credentials.’’

The study found that from 1990 to 2009, the cost of living in Boston increased by 68 percent, while federal poverty guidelines that set a benchmark for government aid rose by just 55 percent. That shift further stymied poor families.

Boston has transformed into a “majority-minority’’ city and witnessed a boom in its Asian and Latino communities. Most members of minority groups live in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and East Boston. By contrast, the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, and South Boston are more than 80 percent white, the study said.