Downward Class mobility, ‘going white,’ and the downside of Section 8
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The Washington Post today informs us of a forthcoming Pew study that, essentially, tells us that bad neighborhoods, in addition to disproportionately keeping down poor and crime-besieged black families, also have a way of dragging middle-class blacks down into poverty:
Researchers have found that being raised in poor neighborhoods plays a major role in explaining why African American children from middle-income families are far more likely than white children to slip down the income ladder as adults. [...]
This week, Pew will release findings of a study that helps explain that economic fragility, pointing to the fact that middle-class blacks are far more likely than whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, which has a negative effect on even the better-off children raised there. The impact of neighborhoods is greater than other factors in children’s backgrounds, Pew concludes.
Even as African Americans have made gains in wealth and income, the report found, black children and white children are often raised in starkly different environments. Two out of three black children born from 1985 through 2000 were raised in neighborhoods with at least a 20 percent poverty rate, compared with just 6 percent of white children, a disparity virtually unchanged from three decades prior. [...]
Using a study that has tracked more than 5,000 families since 1968, the Pew research found that no other factor, including parents’ education, employment or marital status, was as important as neighborhood poverty in explaining why black children were so much more likely than whites to lose income as adults.
via Poor Neighborhoods Key in Income Difference, Study Finds – washingtonpost.com .
The term “neighborhood,” as a factor, strikes me as a pretty broad net. Researchers involved with the report have said as much — that they haven’t yet nailed down which aspects of a neighborhood matter most: For example what correlations, if any, exist between a poor neighborhood and crime rates or paternal absenteeism?
Given the trend, to which, I suspect, middle-class black families have been attuned for years, one can hardly blame those same middle-class families when they leave their old neighborhoods at the first signs of prosperity. One can’t help but wonder how many families have been adversely affected over the years because of the well-documented stigma attached to “going white.” It’s a delicate issue, one that is doubtless fraught with all kinds of really difficult questions about identity for those who face it. But the data seem to speak pretty clearly in regards to the dangers of staying put in a rough neighborhood.
Giving back to one’s community is important. But I know I’d be damned if I stayed in a neighborhood that was going to drag my kids down if I didn’t have to.
But what’s really interesting to me — if slightly terrifying — is the way we’ve seen this sort of poverty-as-albatross phenomenon play out through the Section 8 housing program, which helps low-income families live in homes or apartments they might not otherwise afford.
Hanna Rosin writes in The Atlantic, last summer:
While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.” The leaders of the group, which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what might be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.
via American Murder Mystery – The Atlantic (July/August 2008).
The culprit, Rosin reports, is a sort of inverse to the problem described by the Pew study, insofar as it pertains to crime, which always correlates strongly with poverty: Previously lower-poverty and lower-crime neighborhoods, once injected with a significant number of Section 8 residents, were becoming crime-ridden.
In the most literal sense, the national effort to diffuse poverty has succeeded. Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty—meaning that at least 40 percent of households are below the federal poverty level—has declined by 24percent. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Recently, the housing expert George Galster, of Wayne State University, analyzed the shifts in urban poverty and published his results in a paper called “A Cautionary Tale.” While fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40 percent. This pattern is not necessarily better, either for poor people trying to break away from bad neighborhoods or for cities, Galster explains. His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.
Studies show that recipients of Section8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods. One recent study publicized by HUD warned that policy makers should lower their expectations, because voucher recipients seemed not to be spreading out, as they had hoped, but clustering together. Galster theorizes that every neighborhood has its tipping point—a threshold well below a 40 percent poverty rate—beyond which crime explodes and other severe social problems set in. Pushing a greater number of neighborhoods past that tipping point is likely to produce more total crime. In 2003, the Brookings Institution published a list of the 15 cities where the number of high-poverty neighborhoods had declined the most. In recent years, most of those cities have also shown up as among the most violent in the U.S., according to FBI data.
It isn’t hard to see why these findings aren’t particularly popular. They essentially amount to saying that you can take the kid out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the kid. Remove criminals or would-be-criminals from their dangerous social networks, it seems, and they’ll often simply create new ones, and in places where there were far fewer before.
And, taken in context with the Pew study, the implications for middle-class families in those neighborhoods are clear: when Section 8 injects a middle-class neighborhood with extra low-income families, there’s potential for their dragging a lot of middle-class people down a few rungs with them.
These findings are really disheartening, and I’m not quite sure how to process them just yet. To my mind, they basically say that poverty is more than a state of mind, or a function of culture, or some other construct, as my liberal education taught me. For many, it is simply an inescapable, immutable reality — one that, like a virus, threatens all it touches, despite one’s best efforts to change the culture of poverty, despite education and class awareness. That these phenomena are still bound to a history of racial discrimination in this country — to the extent that, too often, we can simply equate black with “poor” and white with “affluent” — is more than disheartening. It’s nothing short of heartbreaking.
There’s a lot to unpack with these kinds of findings, and I confess my thoughts here feel somewhat half-formed. My feeling is I’ll be revisiting this stuff often here at American Crossroads. A nod to ContextsCrawler blog for a heads up on the WaPo story.
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“While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year.”
Not surprising when you consider that smaller cities tend to more or less one industry towns.
Sad i would expect this kind of racial profiling from an east coast snob, but as a fellow hoosier im a little disappointed. equating white with affluent and black with poor? having grown up in kokomo, IN, in section 8 housing, most of my neighbors were white, i beg to differ just a little bit, bub. i will put my byrd in the face of any alleged intellectual that thinks our society perpetuates to ‘keep the black man down’. Plenty of rich bastards keepin plenty of white people down too! It’s not white vs black. its wealthy and connected vs poor and addicted. period.
Andy,
As a guy who can’t pay his bills despite living rent-free in a spare studio cabin owned by his uncle, I’m pretty sure that makes me poor, too. The sun burn I got at the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race confirms that I’m also white. So, as a poor white guy myself, I would certainly never assert that poor equates with black and affluent with white on a one-to-one basis.
What I wrote was that “too often we can simply equate black with poor and affluent with white.” For the sake of argument, this is true, and the facts do my job for me. In 2006, only 8.2% of non-Hispanic whites lived in poverty, according to US Census estimates (see here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html); meanwhile, a quarter of blacks lived in poverty — that’s three times as many. Even among middle-class blacks, as the Pew study above indicates, a full 2/3 live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty — a phenomenon which, as shown above, often pulls middle-class blacks right back into poverty. Go back and read the citation. This isn’t the case with most middle-class white families.
That’s not to say there aren’t wealthy black kids or poor white kids. It’s simply to state a fact: that the poverty rate is racially disproportional. I’ll go so far as as to state that perhaps I should have qualified my statement in somewhat looser terms. But that’s as far as I’ll go.
As for a conspiracy to “keep the black man down,” those are your words, not mine. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept to grasp for so many people, but I’ll try. Racism used to be institutionalized — enshrined by law, in fact — and it was that way for hundreds of years, from slavery through Jim Crow. That created a situation in which most blacks in America were poor.
You stated that “it’s wealthy and connected vs. poor and addicted. Period.” Fine, lets assume institutional racism is completely dead and there aren’t, say, major differences in how crack (more prevalent among minorities) and powder cocaine (more prevalent among whites) are prosecuted. Let’s assume racial profiling doesn’t exist.
Let’s assume you’re right, because, ok, mostly you are.
It’s the history of institutionalized racism that continues to do most of the discrimination work for us. Whether you’re black or white, if your parents were poor, chances are you’ll wind up poor, too (unless, as shown in the study above, you start off middle-class and end up poor — a mostly black phenomenon). The story of class mobility in America is mostly an illusion, interrupted by the odd exception like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that proves the rule. So here’s the bottom line: If blacks started off disproportionately poor because of institutionalized racism, they’ll stay disproportionately poor because of the kinds of things you mention: low-quality education, violence, broken homes, and lack of connections and access to quality health care, etc., etc.
Until we see something closer to parity in the poverty rate between whites and minorities, it will still be useful to at least remember these facts and examine things in these terms. The fact is that, comparatively speaking, blacks in America more often face a dearth of opportunity than whites do. It’s just a fact. This disparity, this construct, is not true across the board. But it’s true enough of the time that it’s irresponsible to pretend it no longer exists.
In response to another comment. See in context »Alex Kotlowitz, Jonathan Kozol and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc have described this eloquently in their books. If were queen, all three of these would be required reading in every classroom in the U.S., preferably in high school, no later. It would also be a requirement for every elected official at every level. Systems don’t change much or very quickly. People live within systems, whatever the mythology of individualism that persists, whether it’s their family, project, neighborhood or Ivy grad school.
Caitlin,
Of the three authors you mention, I’m only familiar on an I’ve-actually-read-it level with Kozol, but I’m a big fan. In fact, I just cited an article he wrote for Harper’s about modern-day school segregation in a post I made last week.
In my perfect world, I would add Jane Jacobs to that list. Even though she’s not writing about race or education specifically, I always find her work provides a great framework for understanding those “systems” you mention — at least in urban environments.
Thanks for the comment, and for adding a few more names to my reading list.
In response to another comment. See in context »I read “Savage Inequalities” right after I moved to the U.S. permanently in June 1988 and it taught me a great deal, living then in the town-gown weirdness of Hanover,NH, home to wealthy Dartmouth kids in Porsches while other people there lived down dirt roads in trailers. People assume cities are filled with poor people, but so are many rural areas, obviously, and you can only really see it if you live there too.
I put off reading “Random Family” for a long time, assuming it was overpraised. It is an astonishing piece of work. You just veer between awe at what she did and despair of ever doing anything as good yourself. People rave about Ehrenreich-on-poverty but I’m not wild about her work. And Jane Jacobs, for sure. I found it interesting she moved to my hometown, Toronto, which has been cited as a city that works.
“Poverty” equals “hopelessness.” That’s life’s pre-ordained path that these inhabitants of Section 8 housing follow. So, in general, you can take the kid out of the ghetto but unless you change his or her point of view, pump up his or her self-esteem and actually give him or her a leg up, in most cases he or she will flounder about until he or she loses heart. This really is not unique to a particular race. It is the plight of any group who learn from messages both overt and subliminal that they are lesser than, not beautiful, not intelligent, just not in with the in crowd. He or she will revert to the known, safe, familiar, poverty borne out of poor self-esteem, lack of positive role models, lack of the skills needed to prevail, especially, in our current rabid corporatist model. Lack of hope, lack of meaningful ways to form a new way of life, a new belief system lead to a return to old habits and more familiar territory. In general, blacks and whites and other minorities want the same things, good schools, safe neighborhoods, good health care, places to congregate and exchange ideas and promote business. Why is it that, to this day, we still cannot do this together? We can tear down the ghettos and rebuild modern housing but, if it is still silently and openly a separate place, not included in the mainstream, it is doomed to end up going the way of the project that it supplanted. We simply cannot fake racial equality and acceptance.