Oh, you poor, poor people
The Two Americas
Martha Paskoff,
Elizabeth Perl
The Century Foundation, 7/7/04
During the course of a campaign that ultimately landed John Edwards in the role of vice presidential nominee, his main theme was that the United States is economically divided between the haves and have-nots. Here's a line from his winter stump speech: "We really live in two Americas: one America for the powerful insiders and the privileged few, and another America for everybody else. And no one on the outside suffers more than 35 million men, women, and children who live in poverty. Millions work 40 hours a week, millions more work less because they can't find a job, and still the American dream is out of their reach. They aren't looking to their government for a handout, but some help up and out of despair and into the middle class."
One aspect of that economic divide that now seems likely to receive long overdue
attention is concentrated poverty - neighborhoods in which at least 30 percent
of the residents fall below the poverty line. Focusing on concentrated poverty
is essential because it lies at the root of the chronic problems that continue
to plague virtually all major cities: high unemployment and crime rates, bad
schools, out-of-wedlock births, substance abuse, and so on. Even though the
enormous costs of those problems radiate out to all taxpayers, at the national
level politicians by and large have neglected to focus on developing a remotely
coherent strategy for discussing, much less fighting, concentrated poverty.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation, in collaboration with the Population Research
Bureau, identified
"severely distressed neighborhoods" by looking at labor force
participation, education, and family composition, in addition to poverty rates.
The foundation found that more than eighteen million Americans lived in severely
distressed neighborhoods in 2000, up from 15.2 million in 1990. The study also
found that children are more likely to live in severely distressed neighborhoods
than adults—7.7 percent of all children live in severely distressed neighborhoods
compared to 6.0 percent of adults. Black and Hispanic children are hit the hardest:
an overwhelming 28 percent of all black children and 13 percent of all Hispanic
children are growing up in severely distressed neighborhoods.
For children living in severely distressed neighborhoods, the outcomes can be
dire. They are more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, do poorly in school,
and less likely to move into the workforce. Moreover, studies have documented
the extent to which living in high poverty neighborhoods perpetuates problems
that are associated to a lesser extent with low-incomes generally. For example,
students attending schools in high poverty neighborhoods are far
less likely to graduate or go on to college that children attending middle-class
schools. According to 2000 census data, of those 25 years or older living
in high poverty neighborhoods, 43
percent did not have a high school degree.
The debate over President Clinton's welfare reform law was the last time the
nation focused on poverty. That legislation appears to have done more good than
harm, on balance, but it didn't really attack the concentrations of poverty
that lie at the heart of the problem. It is understandable that many Americans
consider poverty and the problems connected to it to be intractable. But evidence
is mounting that housing policies aimed
at enabling low-income families to move to middle-income neighborhoods
and public school choice plans that allow poor students to attend middle-class
schools (see here
and here) work.
One difference between Michael Harrington's 1962 book "The Other America,"
which helped to inspire the War on Poverty, and John Edwards' "Two Americas"
is that Edwards recognizes that conservative policies have held back not only
the poor but also the middle class. Another difference is that we now know a
lot more about how the divide between the haves and the have-nots can actually
be breached. What remains to be seen is whether we have the political will to
succeed.
