12 THE PERSISTENCE OF CONCENTRATED POVERTY NEIGHBORHOODS
Jesus is memorably quoted as having said that “the poor you shall always have with you.”1 Not only have the poor always been present, but for many centuries they and their neighborhoods also made up the greater part of most cities. As urban historian Charles Duff puts it, until relatively recently “cities were squalid places with isolated bits of beauty.”2 Despite the growth of the middle class in the nineteenth century, large parts of most European and American cities remained crowded, disease-ridden areas of abject poverty, as is still true in many cities in the Global South today. As we described earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century millions of people in American cities were still desperately poor, living in the “filthy and rotten tenements” that Jane Addams, Jacob Riis, and other reformers of the time vividly described.3
With the increasing prosperity of the twentieth century and the transformation of society from the 1930s through the 1960s, the number of poor people in the United States dropped sharply, from the “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished” of Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural address in 1937 to 12 percent, or one-eighth of the nation, by 1969.4 Impressive as that was, the distribution of poverty remained sharply unequal, with 27 percent of the Black and other nonwhite population below the poverty level, compared to only 8 percent of the white population.5 Since then the total poverty rate has fluctuated only narrowly, rising during recessions and falling during periods of recovery. In 2019 despite ten years of economic recovery, it had dropped only slightly, to 10.5 percent. Much of this decline was attributable to the substantial drop in Black and Latinx poverty rates after the end of the Great Recession, as can be seen in figure 12.1. Despite improvement, however, both were still more than double the white poverty rate, while the share of Black children living in poor households was just over 25 percent, compared to 8 percent in the white population. Still, there are two and a half times as many white people as Black people living below the poverty level in the United States.
FIGURE 12.1. Poverty rate by race and ethnicity, 1959 to 2019
(Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey)
Our subject, however, is less the number of people in poverty as it is their concentration. What it means to be poor is one thing, to live in a concentrated poverty area something else, and to be both poor and live in such an area yet another thing. As Paul Jargowsky writes, that last group “shoulders the ‘double disadvantage’ of having poverty-level income while living in a neighborhood dominated by poor families and the social problems that follow.”6 From a neighborhood perspective, the issue is that although poverty rates have changed little, poverty has become steadily more concentrated. The number of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, along with the number of poor people living in those neighborhoods, is far greater today than in the 1970s.
While poverty has negative effects on individuals, concentrated poverty can generate spillover effects, or externalities, that negatively affect individuals and the community over and above the individual effects of poverty itself. The concentration of poverty in a neighborhood has an independent effect on outcomes, such as educational success and workforce participation, after controlling for the other factors that could influence the outcome, including individual poverty. Poor people generally experience worse life outcomes when living in an area of concentrated poverty than in an economically mixed or lower-poverty neighborhood. The ways in which the character of the neighborhood can change individual outcomes are often referred to as “neighborhood effects.”7
There is no generally accepted standard for defining concentrated poverty areas. Different researchers use 20, 30, and even 40 percent poverty rates as cut-off points for concentrated poverty. In a review of the research on neighborhood effects, George Galster concluded that “the independent impacts of neighborhood poverty rates in encouraging negative outcomes for individuals like crime, school leaving, and duration of poverty spells appear to be nil unless the neighborhood exceeds about 20 percent poverty, whereupon the externality effects grow rapidly until the neighborhood reaches approximately 40 percent poverty; subsequent increases in the poverty population appear to have no marginal effect.”8 No absolute level of poverty in a neighborhood can be considered to be a trigger for neighborhood effects. Context matters. As we will discuss, it is one thing to live in a concentrated poverty neighborhood with an intact physical and social fabric and another thing to live in a neighborhood with a similar poverty level but with residents scattered among many vacant and abandoned properties with few social ties.
The neighborhood effects associated with concentrated poverty reflect a wide range of different causal mechanisms. Galster lists fifteen causal pathways that potentially connect a neighborhood context of concentrated poverty to individual behavioral and health outcomes.9 Efforts of researchers to control for multiple other variables in order to isolate the effect of concentrated poverty, however, mischaracterize the process driving these effects and can inadvertently underestimate neighborhood effects. As with other neighborhood dynamics, these variables are not only affected by the poverty context but also interact with one another to produce reinforcing cycles of decline, reinforcing and exacerbating the effect of any single factor.10
However measured, concentrated poverty is increasing. Cortright and Mahmoudi studied the change in high-poverty census tracts in the nation’s fifty-one largest metropolitan areas from 1970 to 2010.11 Although the population of the areas they studied grew only slightly over that period, the number of people living in high-poverty census tracts more than doubled, from just under 2 million to 4.2 million, as the share of these regions’ poor population living in areas of concentrated poverty went from 28 percent to 39 percent. Looking at a more recent period, Jargowsky found that after declining by 27 percent from 1990 to 2000, the number of extremely high-poverty tracts across the country increased by 76 percent, or 1,902 tracts, from 2000 to 2013.12
Race is deeply implicated in concentrated poverty. While there are many more poor white people than poor Black people, far more poor Black and Latinx people live in concentrated poverty areas. In 2013, 5 million poor Black and 4.3 million poor Latinx residents lived in extremely high-poverty areas compared to 3.5 million poor white residents.13 The invidious reality of racial disparities, which affects every aspect of the conversation on concentrated poverty, is central to understanding concentrated poverty neighborhoods in America today.
The Origins and Growth of Concentrated Poverty Neighborhoods
As we noted in chapter 3, few American cities had large African American populations before World War I, and most Black residents lived in racially mixed neighborhoods although often in small segregated blocks or buildings in those neighborhoods. Large segregated Black neighborhoods such as Chicago’s Bronzeville and New York’s Harlem emerged with the First Great Migration in the 1910s and 1920s, often filling the spaces left by immigrant populations who were beginning to move into newer less crowded neighborhoods farther from the city center.
These areas were widely called ghettos, a term that, while contested, reflected the reality that these were not voluntary ethnic enclaves but rather segregated areas enforced by social and legal pressures imposed by the dominant white majority. They contained much grinding poverty, an inevitable result of the discrimination from which Black workers suffered. They were a world apart, however, from today’s concentrated poverty areas. Stable working-class and prosperous middle-class Black families lived in the same neighborhoods as the poor, and the concentration of population and talent in these neighborhoods was a powerful impetus for robust economic activity and strong social and religious institutions. Crowded commercial streets and vibrant entertainment scenes coexisted side by side with poverty, overcrowding, and unhealthy housing conditions.14
The puzzle is why after World War II as opportunities for African Americans grew, segregated and increasingly disinvested areas of concentrated poverty also grew. Part of the explanation has to do with the racist system of mortgage lending, reinforced by the New Deal’s creation of the Federal Housing Administration, that we discussed in chapter 4. Mortgage discrimination, however, was not an invention of the Federal Housing Administration. The typical white male banker, unconstrained by either custom or fair housing laws, did not need a federal stamp of approval to discriminate against would-be Black home buyers.
Mortgage discrimination, however, mattered less than one might think because the reality was that Black families, especially in cities, had few opportunities to become homeowners with a mortgage or otherwise. The great majority of new single-family developments were governed by racial covenants, while within the Black ghettos almost all properties were owned by absentee investors. In 1940, nationally only 15 percent of Black families were homeowners, disproportionately concentrated in the rural South. Homeownership rates for urban Black families were much lower: 8 percent in Baltimore, 7 percent in Chicago, and 6 percent in Milwaukee.
Black populations in most northern cities surged after 1940. The Second Great Migration, during and after World War II, was far larger than the first wave during and after World War I. From 1940 to 1970, the African American population of Chicago grew by over 800,000, of Detroit by over 500,000 and of Cleveland by 200,000. The influx of Black migrants led to even greater overcrowding of already densely populated segregated neighborhoods. By 1951 an estimated 140,000 people crowded into Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, an area probably little more than two square miles.15 For all their vitality, these areas were pressure cookers looking for an outlet.
The urban renewal and interstate highway programs compounded matters. As we described in chapter 4, entire Black neighborhoods were swept away during the 1950s and 1960s, with devastating effects. Over half a million households, roughly half of them people of color, were officially displaced through urban renewal, a number that fails to account for the thousands who may have fallen through the program’s cracks and the hundreds of thousands more displaced by the highways carved out of the hearts of American cities. With too little affordable replacement housing being built through urban renewal and nothing at all under the highway program, these families needed a place to go. That place was provided by white flight. The millions of white families who left the cities for the largely all-white suburban subdivisions or for the fast-growing Sunbelt states left both shabby immigrant neighborhoods that had seen far better days and neighborhoods of solid single-family houses built up to the 1920s and 1930s.
As Black families moved or were displaced, the Black population began to bifurcate economically and spatially. While affluent, working-class, and poor Black families had, by necessity, shared the segregated quarters to which they had previously been relegated, over the ensuing decades their paths diverged. As African American columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in 2010, “no one quite realized it at the time, but Black America was being split.”16 While prosperous African American families leapfrogged over the older and closer immigrant neighborhoods and moved into more attractive neighborhoods being vacated by the white middle class, such as Detroit’s Crary–St. Mary’s, poor or near-poor families either stayed in what was left of the original Black neighborhoods—many moving into hulking high-rise public housing projects—or moved into the cheaper, shabbier formerly immigrant neighborhoods nearby. Robinson sums up the change:
Some moved out—to neighborhoods unscarred by the riots, to the suburbs …—and moved up, taking advantage of new opportunities. They moved up the ladder at work, purchased homes and built equity, sent their children to college, demanded and earned most of their rightful share of America’s bounty. They became the Mainstream majority. Some didn’t make it. They saw the row houses and apartment buildings where they lived sag from neglect; they hunkered down as big public housing projects … became increasingly dysfunctional and dangerous. They sent their children to low-performing schools that had already been forsaken by the brightest students and the pushiest parents. They remained while jobs left the neighborhood, as did capital, as did ambition, as did public order. They became the Abandoned.17
The split in the Black community has been well documented. As late as 1970, the average African American still lived in a neighborhood that was more economically mixed, with the well-to-do, middle-class, and poor living side by side, than the average white neighborhood. Only a decade later, that was no longer true. As Kendra Bischoff and Sean Reardon, two scholars who have carefully studied the spatial and economic shifts in American society, write, “segregation by income among Black families … grew four times as much [than among white families] between 1970 and 2009.”18
As Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi have shown, once a neighborhood becomes an area of concentrated poverty, its likelihood of changing its condition is small. Of the 1,119 concentrated poverty census tracts in 1970 they studied, forty years later nearly three-quarters were still concentrated poverty areas. About one in five had moved slightly upward but were still above-average poverty neighborhoods, while only one in eleven had “rebounded” and become average or low poverty areas.19 A few neighborhoods escaped the vicious cycle of increasing poverty and distress, whether through gentrification or otherwise, but mainly in cities that showed strong economic growth overall. As Cortright and Mahmoudi point out, “just three cities (New York, Chicago, and Washington) accounted for one-third of all census tracts that saw poverty rates decline from above 30 percent in 1970 to below 15 percent in 2010.”20 Conversely, in sixteen of the fifty-one metropolitan areas they studied, not one high-poverty tract escaped high poverty over that forty-year period.
The stickiness of long-term concentrated poverty neighborhoods is only one part of the challenge. Of greater concern are the many neighborhoods that were not concentrated poverty neighborhoods then but are today. These areas typically include many more persons in poverty than the long-term concentrated poverty neighborhoods, many of which have been rapidly losing population. Data from the Cleveland area bear this out. Five out of six of the poor persons living in concentrated poverty areas in 2010 were living in areas that were not concentrated poverty areas in 1970. Of those, more than half lived in areas that were low-poverty areas (under 15% poverty rate) in 1970.21
Most of this damage is quite recent. The number of high-poverty tracts dropped during the 1990s, only to rise dramatically since 2000. Of the sixty-five census tracts in Cleveland in which the poverty rate was over 40 percent in 2018, only twenty-six had a poverty rate of 40 percent or more in 2000. The change is powerfully visible in figure 12.2, which shows how the expansion of concentrated poverty (30% or more) in majority-Black tracts in Detroit from 2000 to 2015. While a handful of census tracts moved modestly upward, the majority of Detroit neighborhoods that were not high-poverty areas in 2000 had become so by 2015. This is the flip side of the decline of middle neighborhoods that we discussed in chapter 11. Most of the areas that went from low to high poverty in Detroit from 2000 to 2015 had been Black middle neighborhoods, home to the city’s once-large Black middle class.
Many forces have driven the growth in concentrated poverty neighborhoods largely populated by people of color. Public policies, however well-intended, have exacerbated poverty concentration, beginning with the construction of the massive public housing projects of the 1950s that over the ensuing decades became increasingly populated by the poorest of the poor. Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, while arguably helping many people to move out of poverty, did little for the neighborhoods they lived in. People who got better jobs often moved out, leaving those who did not behind.
Subsequent publicly financed low-income housing programs further compounded the problem, as the great majority of those developments were built in already high-poverty areas driven by both opposition to subsidized housing from more affluent and whiter areas, particularly in the suburbs, and an often unrealistic belief by local officials and nonprofit organizations that such developments would somehow change the neighborhoods where they were built. While they undoubtedly improved housing conditions for many families, with a handful of exceptions they rarely did anything for the neighborhood.
While concentrated poverty neighborhoods got subsidized housing and some social services, they got little else. In the meantime, the quality of life deteriorated as financially strapped cities cut back on social programs, public services, and capital investments. Public schools in these neighborhoods declined, and as enrollments declined, schools were often closed without regard to the supportive role they played in many neighborhoods. Public safety, already uncertain, deteriorated further with the onset of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Most of those who could do so moved out. As poverty increased and population density dropped, neighborhood stores and services disappeared. Policing in concentrated poverty areas increasingly became a matter of protecting the more prosperous parts of the city than serving these areas’ residents.
FIGURE 12.2. Majority-Black areas with 30 percent or higher poverty rate in Detroit, 2000 and 2015
(Sources: decennial census and American Community Survey data. Map by PolicyMap, adapted by Bill Nelson)
Note: Areas within black lines were high-poverty areas in 2000; gray-shaded areas were high-poverty areas in 2015 (Authors’ work based on decennial census and American Community Survey data)
These neighborhoods and the people who lived in them were mostly written off by the larger white-majority society. While Robinson’s Black mainstream majority were often able to adapt to an economy in which factory jobs were replaced by jobs in eds and meds, less-skilled and less-educated workers were largely irrelevant to the new knowledge economy. As urban economies have revived, employers have recruited new workers from the suburbs and from the pool of educated young people who had begun to migrate to the cities, largely ignoring the residents of these neighborhoods. In many concentrated poverty neighborhoods, less than half of the adult population actively participates in the labor force, and of those at any given time, as many as a quarter may be without a job.
Vacancy and Abandonment
The gradual abandonment of their housing stock was part and parcel of the disinvestment of these neighborhoods. While we touched on abandonment in chapter 4, it is closely interwoven with the story of concentrated poverty. Vacancy and abandonment had not been an issue in the earlier history of American neighborhoods. From the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II, observers of low-income neighborhoods invariably noted how crowded they were, often referring to them as “teeming,” “packed,” or, more dismissively, “swarming.” As discussed previously, at the end of World War II there were few vacant homes or apartments to be had.
By 1960, the postwar housing shortage was largely a thing of the past and in many cities was turning into an oversupply of housing. During the 1960s, property owners first began to walk away from properties they saw as worthless or unduly burdensome; by the end of the decade, people had begun to talk about “abandonment” as a serious urban issue, which it became at least briefly during the 1970s. After a flurry of activity, however, public priorities shifted, and abandonment fell off the policy radar until the late 1990s. Properties continued to be abandoned, gradually creating the landscape that is sometimes known today as the “urban prairie,” as can be seen in the scenes from St. Louis, Missouri, and Gary, Indiana, shown in figures 12.3 and 12.4.
FIGURE 12.3. Street in Northside St. Louis
(Google Earth © 2022 Google)
FIGURE 12.4. Aerial view of blocks in Gary, Indiana
(Google Earth © 2022 Google)
Since the 1960s, people have walked away from millions of properties in American towns and cities, cities have demolished millions of vacant buildings, and vacant, derelict properties have become a pervasive part of the urban landscape. In some cities, including Detroit and Gary, recent field surveys have found that vacant buildings and lots make up over 40 percent of the parcels in the city.22 In a study of forty-nine Rust Belt cities, Jason Hackworth identified 262 “extreme housing loss neighborhoods,” census tracts that lost more than 50 percent of their housing between 1970 and 2010.23
Understanding why properties are abandoned begins with economics but does not end there. Most fundamentally, it begins with the neighborhood market. If the supply of housing, storefronts, or industrial floor space exceeds the market demand for that space, some part of that space will become vacant. If supply continues to exceed demand over a long period, as is likely to be the case in any neighborhood showing sustained population decline, vacancies can become a permanent condition. If houses sit vacant for too long and are not maintained or secured, they deteriorate like the house in figure 12.3, ultimately to the point where they cannot be reused and are eventually demolished.
Population decline drives vacancy. Nearly 30,000 households in Cleveland lived in concentrated poverty Black neighborhoods in 1970, but only 11,000 remained in those same neighborhoods in 2010. Since each household occupies a housing unit, by 2010 those neighborhoods needed 19,000 fewer dwellings to house their residents than in 1970. Moreover, in 1970 those neighborhoods already had an excess supply of 4,500 empty housing units. Over the next forty years as houses were vacated, they were abandoned and, along with much of the 1970 excess supply, were ultimately demolished. The upshot was that by 2010 there were 20,500 fewer housing units in the area, leaving thousands of additional vacant lots where the houses once stood. Those lots remained vacant because there was no market demand. People were unwilling to build on these vacant lots because the cost of construction would far exceed the market value of the new buildings.
A host of public and private policies and practices exacerbated decline and abandonment, increasing the likelihood that a house, once vacated, would be abandoned. These included outright redlining by lenders and insurance companies, common in the 1950s and 1960s but less frequent in later years, as well as widespread lender reluctance to make mortgages in areas with low and declining property values. Many states’ tax foreclosure laws and policies led to properties often ending up in a legal and ownership limbo and others ending up in the hands of predatory landlords likely to milk the properties and walk away after a few years.
At some point, the accumulation of vacant properties changes from being an effect of a declining neighborhood housing market to a cause, setting in motion reinforcing processes of contagious abandonment resulting in hypervacancy.24 Based on the authors’ experiences and observations, once about 20 percent or more of the neighborhood’s dwellings are vacant, along with a comparable or greater number of vacant lots, the neighborhood’s housing market effectively collapses. House prices decline to little more than the transaction cost, reflecting the fact that at that point, except for a few bottom-feeding speculators and odd types who relish the idea of living in an urban prairie, there are no buyers for the neighborhood’s homes.
In what some people may see as a paradox, while house prices drop to near-vanishing levels, rents stay well beyond the reach of large numbers of the poor and near-poor residents of concentrated poverty areas. The reason is straightforward. For landlords to stay in business, they must collect enough rent to cover their costs, namely property taxes, insurance, maintenance costs, mortgage payments, and at least a modest profit margin or return on equity. Unlike sales prices, which can go down virtually to zero if the market is too weak, if landlords cannot collect the minimum rents they need to stay in business, they no longer have any motivation to keep renting the unit and typically walk away.
For a responsible landlord who maintains her property, conscientiously makes her property tax and mortgage payments, and is willing to accept a modest rate of return on her investment, that minimum economic rent in a typical older American city is usually somewhere—depending on property tax rates and the cost or value of the property—between $700 and $900. For a single mother working full-time at a job paying little more than the minimum wage, that rent makes up 50 percent or more of her gross earnings.25 In Cleveland, nearly half of all renters living in concentrated poverty neighborhoods other than those living in subsidized housing spend 50 percent or more of their gross income for rent, compared to one-quarter of all renters nationally. Yet, the rent most of them pay is still barely enough to keep a conscientious landlord in business.
The unsustainable amounts for rents being spent by so many low-income households is in turn the principal trigger for the national epidemic of evictions, an epidemic concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. As Matthew Desmond shows in his book Evicted, the households most at risk of eviction and subsequent homelessness or doubling-up are single mothers with children, who are by far the poorest single demographic subgroup in American society and disproportionately live in concentrated poverty areas.26 Constant insecurity and frequent moves triggered by eviction not only destabilize families, impair adults’ chances of finding stable employment, and undermine their children’s education but also erode the weak ties that are a neighborhood’s lifeblood.27
Disinvestment by local government in schools, public safety, and other public services and infrastructure can further sap what is left of these neighborhoods’ vitality. Crumbling streets, broken streetlights, trash-filled vacant lots, and boarded-up empty school buildings all send powerful signals that the neighborhood has been written off by local government and the larger society. Robinson’s characterization of the people who live in these neighborhoods as the Abandoned is tragically apt.
The Effects of Concentrated Poverty
Sustained poverty is itself debilitating. Lack of enough money coupled with constant insecurity about almost every aspect of one’s life turns life into a constant struggle, made worse by the fact that in American society one is constantly being reminded of how much more most other people have and how that defines one’s status in society. Its effects are magnified and compounded, however, if one is both poor and lives in an area of concentrated poverty. We touched on the power of neighborhood effects in chapter 1. Here we look further at effects specific to concentrated poverty neighborhoods.
Not all racially segregated and concentrated poverty areas share all these debilitating effects. In chapter 1 we cited Eric Klinenberg’s research on the effects of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, which showed that while most high-poverty Black neighborhoods had high death rates, some had among the lowest death rates.28 Among the highest death rates was in North Lawndale, a community that lost 50 percent of its housing units between 1960 and 1990. As one local leader told Klinenberg, “North Lawndale looks like a war zone. It has been bombed out.”29 That description fits dozens of similar poor neighborhoods in older cities and towns across America.
Not only are there few stores and other places to go in North Lawndale, but many residents are also afraid to leave their homes. One resident who had lived in the North Lawndale for more than forty years told Klinenberg that drugs and gun violence had changed everything. “We used to sit outside all night and just talk and do whatever. But that’s changed.”30 With lack of contact, so important for both neighboring and for the development of the networks and the successful role models that lead to opportunity, weak ties become attenuated.
Although support systems based on kinship or close friendship networks may remain intact, means of informal social control outside those networks atrophy, creating a social vacuum that parallels the physical void left by abandoned houses and vacant lots. Voids become no-man’s-lands and breeding places for disorder. Higher levels of disorder and interpersonal violence, as a major Atlanta study found, are highly associated with “childhood trauma, adult trauma and PTSD,” further impairing both adults’ and children’s ability to do more than try to survive.31 As Charles Branas and his University of Pennsylvania colleagues found, when a local organization took over vacant lots in a low-income neighborhood, improved them, and maintained them as attractive green space, not only did the neighbors feel safer, but violent crime around those lots also declined.32
Physical health is closely tied to mental health and powerfully affected by neighborhood conditions. In addition to a high risk of violence and frequent lack of access to fresh food and preventive health care, many concentrated poverty neighborhoods are themselves unhealthy, sometimes because of environmental contamination from the proximity of pollution sources but more so because of the condition of the housing in which large numbers of poor people live.
Most housing in concentrated poverty neighborhoods is old; in most high-poverty areas, over half of the housing units and sometimes as much as 80–90 percent were built prior to World War II. But the problem is not simply the age of the houses. Millions of old homes across the United States provide decent, solid, and often desirable housing. The poverty of the residents in concentrated poverty areas, however, dictates that old houses receive less maintenance, fewer repairs, and less predictable replacement of worn-out systems than needed because of the limited resources of their owners or rents that are often barely enough for landlords to make ends meet, let alone upgrade their properties. As properties deteriorate, damp, mold, obsolete and poorly functioning heating and plumbing systems, and peeling paint, among other problems, create indoor pollution conditions that can trigger asthma or cause lead poisoning and other medical conditions.
Concentrated poverty neighborhoods create powerful barriers to opportunity. As William Julius Wilson has pointed out, the disappearance of the city’s factory jobs and the distance between these neighborhoods and suburban job centers as well as the persistence of racial discrimination have made finding stable, well-paid employment an increasingly difficult challenge for the residents of concentrated poverty neighborhoods.33 The weak ties that are so essential for linking to job opportunities are attenuated, and those ties that do exist are less productive. Wilson points out that Black residents of concentrated poverty neighborhoods in Chicago are less likely than residents of other neighborhoods to have at least one employed friend.34 For those who do find suburban jobs, the low wages and the cost and time of long-distance commuting are further debilitating factors. These factors, coupled with the poor quality of the public services in most concentrated poverty neighborhoods, especially public schools, perpetuate poverty across multiple generations.
As Patrick Sharkey, who has systematically studied multigenerational poverty, has shown, growing up in an area of highly concentrated poverty drastically increases the likelihood that you will remain poor and will never leave the area. Over many generations, these factors have a powerful cumulative effect. Children who are the product of many generations of disadvantage “show substantially worse developmental outcomes when compared to families that live in poor neighborhoods for a single generation … even after we account for everything else in a family that might affect children’s development.”35 As Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found, holding parental income, race, and gender constant, children growing up in poor neighborhoods have significantly less economic mobility as adults than those growing up in more economically diverse areas.36 As we noted in chapter 1, residents of many concentrated poverty areas may have average life expectancies as much as eighteen to twenty years less than the residents of more affluent neighborhoods only a few miles away.
In the final analysis, the juxtaposition of the external and internal factors makes the plight of racially segregated areas of concentrated poverty especially severe. The traumas of poverty, crime, and disorder are triggered and reinforced by widespread racial discrimination, unsafe and unhealthy housing, poor public services, punitive policing, lack of access to fresh food and preventive health care, and physical isolation. These factors are not universal, and not all concentrated poverty neighborhoods share all of them, but few such neighborhoods are unaffected by many if not most of them.
Can Concentrated Poverty Areas Become Good Neighborhoods?
Concentrated poverty areas can become good neighborhoods, but the obstacles are not only economic but also social and political. Any strategy to transform high-poverty areas suffers from the fundamental difficulty that the challenges lie simultaneously in the conditions of the neighborhood and the poverty or near-poverty of the people who live there. Those, in turn, are the product of disinvestment in the people and in the neighborhood by the larger society that denies them the opportunity to thrive. If public or nonprofit programs invest in the residents of such a neighborhood, though, enabling them to escape poverty through education, training, and better-paying employment, the evidence suggests that most of those residents would use their higher earnings to leave the neighborhood. Their lives would be better, which is no small matter, but the neighborhood would be left poorer and more depleted of population.
Along similar lines, many people have called for greater efforts to enable low-income families to move to more prosperous, opportunity-rich communities, typically in the suburbs of older cities. Over the years a variety of pilot programs, of which the federally funded Moving to Opportunity program is best known, have pursued this goal with generally positive outcomes.37 Such programs, along with land-use initiatives such as New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine, which requires suburban municipalities to accommodate their fair share of the regional need for affordable low- and moderate-income housing, need to be expanded beyond their currently modest scope.38 But even if that takes place, those initiatives are likely to affect only a small share of the poor and near-poor households currently living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Thus, programs to move poor households to more affluent areas should be seen as a complement to strategies that focus on high-poverty neighborhoods, not an alternative.
Strategies to invest in and rebuild the neighborhood physically without changing the economic conditions of the residents have little likelihood of success. In theory, it might be possible to attract an economically diverse population to some concentrated poverty areas and rebuild them as mixed-income communities in ways that would enable their existing low-income populations to remain and benefit from the change. In practice, the potential for that taking place except in rare circumstances is vanishingly small even with massive public subsidies. As we discussed earlier, outside of a handful of high-demand cities such as San Francisco and Washington, D.C., or the rare situations in which a neighborhood has unusual locational or other assets, segregated areas of concentrated poverty rarely see significant middle-class in-migration. Moreover, in those few cases in which nonprofits or others have succeeded in building strong market demand in previously concentrated poverty areas that do have those assets, their efforts are more likely to lead to gentrification and the gradual disappearance of the earlier population than to a balanced mixed-income community.
Some organizations have tried to combine physical rebuilding with helping residents escape poverty, but few such efforts have the resources to make more than modest strides in either area. An evaluation of forty-eight comprehensive community initiatives over a 20-year period concluded that individuals benefited but that “those programs did not produce population-level changes,” such as reductions in poverty rates or increases in homeownership.39 Rarely are neighborhood changes enough to prompt individuals, who can now afford to move, to stay in the community.
An unusually heavily resourced effort was mounted in Baltimore in the 1990s, when developer/philanthropist James Rouse convinced governments and foundations to invest over $130 million (nearly $250 million in 2020 dollars) for the combined physical, social, and economic revitalization of Sandtown-Winchester, a deeply distressed concentrated poverty neighborhood in Baltimore. As a 2015 Washington Post report described it, “The effort to revive Sandtown was massive. More than 1,000 homes were eventually renovated or built. Schools were bolstered. Education and health services were launched.”40
Despite investing a great deal of money in a single neighborhood, the initiative failed to bring about sustained change. The Washington Post concluded that “visionary developer James Rouse and city officials injected more than $130 million into the community in a failed effort to transform it. Instead there are block after block of boarded-up houses and too many people with little hope.”41 It’s not that there was no change. Indeed, there’s some evidence that things picked up for a while. During the 1990s, household incomes picked up and unemployment dropped relative to the rest of the city. But after 2000 the gains disappeared, and the neighborhood fell back into its pre-Rouse status quo.42
None of this proves that high-poverty neighborhoods cannot be good neighborhoods in many respects. Indeed, many of the ethnic and religious urban neighborhoods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were good neighborhoods despite the grinding poverty of many of their residents. Even with their often horrendous housing conditions, their environments fostered community spirit and promoted opportunity and upward mobility. There were, however, at least three salient differences between those neighborhoods and most of today’s neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.
First, their residents were connected by deep religious, language, and ethnic ties and shared strong indigenous institutions, such as the parish church or the Jewish landsmanschaften, to help maintain those ties. Those institutions, along with a strong sense of common identity, fostered levels of cohesion and solidarity beyond kinship networks, along with the robust network of weak ties important for neighborhood vitality. Second, while most of the residents of these neighborhoods were poor, each had its leavening of successful people—professionals, merchants, and others—who lived in the neighborhood and were well known to their neighbors. In Italian neighborhoods they were called the “prominenti” and in Jewish neighborhoods the “machers.” Widely seen as role models, their intervention helped propel many a poor child on the path to opportunity.
Third, hearkening back to Klinenberg’s point, these were indeed teeming neighborhoods. Every house was full of people. Some blocks on the Lower East Side, a high-density area even by the standards of the time, contained more than one thousand people per acre, six times the area’s density today, and fifty to one hundred times the density of most American suburbs.43 Its density not only enabled the neighborhood to support strong retail hubs and corridors but also promoted the constant human interaction that fosters vital neighborhood connections. All these factors, of course, were true of many Black neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s.
The people who lived in these neighborhoods benefited from a far more robust opportunity framework than the residents of today’s concentrated poverty neighborhoods. Steady employment—although often grueling and unpleasant—was readily available for immigrants with limited English proficiency and little formal education, while a rapidly growing economy meant that as they acculturated, paths to upward mobility were widely available. Changes in the urban economy have diminished opportunities and narrowed potential paths of upward mobility. The split in the Black community described earlier deprived concentrated poverty areas of successful middle-class people who could bridge the gap between the neighborhood and the larger society. Moreover, for all the discrimination experienced by immigrants in earlier eras, it was never as pervasive and far-reaching as racial discrimination then and to a large extent even now.
Without questioning the imperative of continued investment in human opportunity, this suggests that much of the effort to revitalize concentrated poverty neighborhoods, in the sense of placing the focus on changing the economic or housing market character of those neighborhoods, is misdirected and that a different way of thinking about these neighborhoods is in order. Barring a fundamental change in the workings of the American society and economy, the evidence suggests that most concentrated poverty neighborhoods are likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, whatever interventions are made by governments, community development corporations, or philanthropies. This does not mean, however, that those neighborhoods cannot be made far better neighborhoods.
Improving a neighborhood does not change the poverty of the people who live in it, but it can change the conditions under which they live. If their neighborhoods become safer, cleaner places and the houses they live in become safer and healthier, that can fundamentally change their quality of life. If that can be coupled with changes to the opportunity framework, such as greater job opportunities for adults and better schools for children, that will further change their lives whether they remain in the neighborhood or not. This is what happened to the South Bronx neighborhoods discussed in chapter 9. While many of those neighborhoods would still be considered concentrated poverty areas, their intact or rebuilt urban fabric, strong amenities, extensive stock of sound, affordable housing, and access to opportunity enable them to function as good neighborhoods.
Recognizing the limits of community development to change the underlying conditions of poverty suggests a radically different approach to these neighborhoods than most models being pursued in the United States. Rather than prioritizing development and efforts to draw market capital, it calls for concentrating more on public services and regulation and community building. It may also suggest new and different ways of delivering public services. One area that is particularly important, and where the challenges have become particularly apparent in recent years, is policing. Without suggesting that low-income communities can effectively police themselves, clearly today’s quasi-military policing model as applied to African American neighborhoods is ineffective at ensuring the safety of the residents. Whether it is even meant to, as many commentators suggest, is another question. While beyond the scope of this book, the mere fact that the question is repeatedly raised bears reflection. Whether true community safety is possible through reform of our current urban police departments or whether new community-based institutions are needed and can be created are also complex questions for which evidence, one way or the other, is in short supply. What is clear, however, is that we need both new models and a real commitment to work with communities to make them safer places for the people who live there.
Another important area, often overlooked by neighborhood planners, is addressing the quality and stability of housing in high-poverty areas. Whatever the merits of building new affordable housing projects, the great majority of the residents of concentrated poverty areas live and will continue to live in existing privately owned housing, a mix of single-family houses, row houses, and scattered small apartment buildings, nearly all over sixty years old and often over a hundred years old. Most are absentee owned. Despite some progress, few cities are making systematic efforts to ensure that these homes and apartments meet fundamental standards of health and safety by enforcing relevant housing codes or doing what they can to help struggling poor families stay in their homes through such means as ensuring that tenants have access to lawyers when contesting eviction filings. The benefits to tenants of such a program are significant, with large numbers of evictions avoided, while the costs of such programs are largely offset by savings in other public services, including homeless shelter costs for families who have lost their homes.44
The single step that might have the greatest positive impact on the quality of life in high-poverty neighborhoods has on its face nothing to do with neighborhoods, namely turning the current federal Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program—or a similar form of housing allowance—into an entitlement program analogous to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that enables low-income families to maintain food security. In contrast to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, under which anyone meeting the income qualifications receives benefits, congressional appropriations for the HCV Program, which makes up the difference between the market rent and what low-income tenants can afford without spending more than 30 percent of their income for shelter, have severely limited the program, and far more families are eligible for the benefit than can be assisted with available funds.45 As a result, the HCV becomes a lottery in which a fortunate few gain a modicum of residential security while the great majority are left to fend for themselves in the marketplace.
The benefits of an entitlement housing allowance to low-income tenants are manifest, but the benefits to the neighborhood are just as powerful.46 For tenants, an entitlement housing allowance dramatically reduces housing insecurity, which means they can remain in the same home longer and are far less likely to be subject to eviction and the risk of homelessness. Their family stability, the adults’ ability to gain and retain stable employment, and the children’s ability to benefit from education by remaining in the same school all become that much greater.
Today’s constant, rapid churning in rental housing, in which low-income tenants turn over on average every two years, is unhealthy for both tenants and neighborhoods. An entitlement housing allowance will dramatically reduce that turnover, with benefits for both. By virtue of their greater stability—economic, temporal, and psychological—the family is more likely to become an active participant in neighborhood life. Since their rent will no longer consume an unconscionable share of their income, they will have greater disposable income, which is likely to benefit neighborhood merchants. Moreover, with an entitlement housing allowance in place, the fear that rigorous code enforcement could result in either untenable rent increases or landlord abandonment would largely disappear.
If community safety and decent, healthy housing are two critical prongs in the process of turning concentrated poverty areas into good neighborhoods, good schools are a third. Good neighborhood-based schools are not only a critical vehicle for mobility and opportunity for a neighborhood’s children but also an important statement about the value of the neighborhood. Moreover, there is compelling albeit scattered evidence from schools around the country that it is possible to create and operate schools that do indeed take children from impoverished families in high-poverty areas and set them on the path to success.47 Those achievements could be replicated in hundreds of concentrated poverty neighborhoods if the political will to do so existed. Instead, in older cities across the United States, hundreds of public schools in low-income neighborhoods have been closed as a result of declining enrollment, further undermining those neighborhoods’ social fabric, while the ongoing warfare between public school and charter school advocates diverts attention away from the critical issue of student outcomes.
Along similar lines, the quality of public services and facilities is another critically important element. Something as seemingly simple as ensuring that all of a neighborhood’s streetlights are in working order or that parks adequately maintained can improve residents’ quality of life and their perception of the neighborhood. They can become building blocks of community stability and cohesion.
Implicit in all of this is that concentrated poverty neighborhoods can and should function as real communities, offering the connections and social capital needed to make them work as good neighborhoods. The level of investment and commitment by the larger society needed to accomplish this would be substantial but would be more than justified by not only the improvement to the quality of life for millions of people but also moving the United States toward becoming a more just society.