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OCR for page 253
7
Conclusions
In this chapter we present our findings and conclusions concerning the
causes, trends, and effects of ghetto poverty and review possible effects of
federal policies and programs on it. We also offer some suggestions for
improving our knowledge about ghetto poverty, especially about the effects
of federal policies and programs.
In formulating these findings, conclusions, and policy options, the
committee chose to draw broadly on available knowledge. We began
by reading widely in the literature and incorporating relevant findings;
citations to the literature in the sections below reflect our effort to be
comprehensive. We then focused on specific issues by asking leading
scholars and researchers to draft the central chapters in this volume; their
work constitutes an important contribution to the ongoing policy debate,
focusing as it does on some of the most critical issues. Extensive discussions
in our committee deliberations, synthesizing the knowledge thus gained,
resulted in the conclusions that follow.
FINDINGS
As we have shown in this volume, several factors have caused variations
among cities in ghetto poverty: changes in poverty and unemployment
rates, differential in- and out-migration of poor and nonpoor people, and
changes in racial and family composition. (Again, the term ghetto refers to
any neighborhood with an overall poverty rate of 40 percent or more; the
level of ghetto poverty is the proportion of poor people living in ghettos).
First, there is a strong positive bivariate relationship between poverty
rates in standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs) and levels of ghetto
poverty in both 1970 and 1980. A similar relationship existed between
253
OCR for page 254
254
INNER-CITY POVERI Y IN THE UNITED STATES
increasing SMSA poverty rates and increases in ghetto poverty between
1970 and 1980.
Second, in-migration of poor people into existing ghettos did not play
the major role generally ascribed to it in increasing ghetto poverty. Out-
migration of nonpoor people was especially evident in particular cities,
especially Chicago and, to a lesser extent, New York. But in general (see
Chapter 2), the process of ghetto formation, expansion, and contraction
is complicated, reflecting the combined effects of population dispersion,
changes in overall poverty levels, and racial segregation.
Third, poor blacks are much more concentrated within inner cities than
nonblacks (see Chapter 2~. Average real family income in persistently poor
neighborhoods was also depressed by growth in the number of female-
headed families (see Chapter 3~. For example, the number of female-
headed households in ghettos increased 84 percent between 1970 and 1980
in the 50 largest cities and 309 percent in the four cities with the biggest
increases in concentration during the time period (calculated from Bureau
of the Census, 1973, 1985~. Thus, growth in the poor black population and
in the numbers of female-headed families could have contributed to some
of the increases in concentration.
Multivariate analysis of ghettos, holding boundaries constant between
1970 and 1980, shows that the economic fortunes of residents in persistently
poor neighborhoods improved when the economies of the metropolitan
areas encompassing them improved in terms of growth in family income or
a decrease in unemployment rates (see Chapter 3~. They did not, however,
benefit as much as the rest of the metropolitan area. For example, although
a 10 percent increase in real household income at the SMSA level was
associated with a 4 percent gain in a typical persistently poor neighborhood,
a 5 percent metropolitan-wide gain was accompanied by a 2 percent loss in
the poverty neighborhood. In general, an increase of 1 percentage point
in the unemployment rate for the metropolitan area raised the poverty
neighborhood's unemployment rate on about a one-for-one basis and had
little effect on labor force participation rates.
The Changing Structure of Urban Economies
The long-term structural shift in urban economies from manufacturing
to service industries has concurrently decentralized low-wage service jobs
to the suburbs and increased the education and skill requirements for the
types of white-collar service jobs that are expanding most rapidly in many
large cities. Although it seems plausible that the growing spatial separation
between the inner-city location of low-income, mostly minority workers
with low education and skill levels and the suburban location of entry-level
jobs would cause higher unemployment in central cities, previous research
OCR for page 255
CONCLUSIONS
255
has not confirmed a causal connection (see Chapter 4) of the studies of
the spatial mismatch hypothesis uses data later than 1970. This is because,
holding individual characteristics constant, blacks are equally unlikely to be
employed no matter where they live in the metropolitan area.
During the 1970s, the suburbs' share of jobs continued to grow, es-
pecially in metropolitan areas in which ghetto poverty was increasing the
fastest. That trend suggests that the increasing distance from employment
opportunities may have been one cause for lower employment rates in
ghetto areas. Despite the suburbanization of jobs, however, the regression
analysis detailed in Chapter 3 of the changes in unemployment between
1970 and 1980 in ghettos does not find an association with changes in the
central-city share of jobs in metropolitan areas. There was a significant
but small association of 197~1980 changes in ghetto unemployment with
changes in the labor force participation of ghetto residents; it would have
taken a decline of 17 percentage points in central-city job share for labor
force participation in the poverty neighborhoods to decline by 2 percentage
points.
This analysis does not address the argument made by Kasarda (1988)
that there is a skills rather than a spatial mismatch between inner-city work-
ers and jobs in sectors that are growing in central cities and metropolitan
areas. However, the regression analyses of changes in unemployment and
labor force participation in ghetto neighborhoods show that, in addition
to demand factors such as the metropolitan-area unemployment rate, a
number of neighborhood population characteristics were significant. These
characteristics included age, race, and, depending on the sample of cities,
education and household composition (see Chapter 3~.
Effects of Ghetto Poverty
This study explored the extent and location of ghetto poverty as well
as the question of whether poor people living in ghettos are worse off than
poor people living elsewhere. The results of our analyses do not necessarily
indicate that living in areas of concentrated poverty make poor people
worse off than they would be otherwise, but neither do they suggest that
living under such conditions does not matter at all.
The large differences in social and economic conditions between ghetto
neighborhoods and others are not necessarily caused by the effects on resi-
dents of living in extremely poor areas. Neighborhoods with concentrations
of poor people differ in their racial composition and numbers of poor res-
idents from nonpoor neighborhoods, and their characteristics may simply
result from the large numbers of poor minorities that have massed in them
rather than from any negative effects of living in those neighborhoods.
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256
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
One way to examine the question of concentration effects is to compare
the rates of certain social and economic behaviors of poor people living in
ghettos with those of poor people living in areas with less severe poverty
i.e., lower average levels (Bane and Jargowsky, 1988~. Such a comparison
shows differences of moderate to substantial size: 30 percent of poor
adults-virtually all of whom were minorities age 16 and older living in
ghettos were unemployed, compared with 23 percent of the poor blacks
and 16 percent of the poor Hispanics in census tracts with less severe
poverty; 61 percent of poor families in ghettos received public assistance,
compared with 39 percent of the poor blacks and Hispanics in tracts with
less severe poverty; 77 percent of poor children in ghettos lived in female-
headed families, compared with 71 percent of poor black children and 47
percent of Hispanic poor children in tracts with less severe poverty. These
differences, however, may result from unmeasured differences between
poor people in ghettos and those in areas with less severe poverty. For
example, poor people in ghettos may be poorer (i.e., further below the
poverty line); or in areas with less severe poverty more poor people may be
working; or the availability of relatively affordable apartments in high-rise
public housing projects, coupled with discrimination against large, poor,
and minority families elsewhere, may account for the higher proportions of
poor female-headed families among poor people in ghettos.
Contextual Effects
It is difficult to know if living in a ghetto causes higher rates of social
and economic problems because, first, people who move into them may
differ systematically from people who move into other kinds of neighbor-
hoods or, second, people who stay may differ from those who leave. As
detailed in Chapter 4, it is necessary to disentangle the effects of living in
extremely poor neighborhoods from the effects of exogenous factors that
influence people's behavior wherever they live.
There is a small body of research on the contextual effects of living in
a mostly poor or minority neighborhood that appropriately tries to control
the exogenous characteristics of families and individuals. These studies,
reviewed in Chapter 4, have found some significant contextual effects
of neighborhood poverty and racial characteristics; however, the more
exogenous effects were statistically controlled, the smaller the magnitude of
the neighborhood effects.The effects also vary by type of behavior and time
period. For example, although a neighborhood's distance from or proximity
to employment opportunities did not affect the current employment chances
of residents, a study of the effects of one's neighbors' race and income on
one's earnings 10 years later found significant differences. A study of the
effects of classmates' race and family income (Furstenberg et al., 1987)
OCR for page 257
CONCLUSIONS
257
found that having poor classmates significantly increased the odds that a
15- or 16-year-old had sexual intercourse (67 compared with 40 percent).
Another study of age of first intercourse and first pregnancy in a Chicago
sample of unmarried black teenagers (Hogan and Kitagawa, 1985) looked at
the effect of living in one census tract rather than another. After controlling
for a number of exogenous individual characteristics, the study found that
living in a low-quality rather than a middle-quality neighborhood increased
the odds by a third of becoming pregnant in a given month, and living on
the West Side of Chicago (which was heavily and irreversibly damaged in
the riots of the 1960s) raised the odds another two-fifths.
Some studies found countervailing negative effects of being poor in a
nonpoor neighborhood. For example, a study of serious crime by teenagers
in Chicago (Johnstone, 1978) found that poor teenagers living in high-
income neighborhoods were more likely to commit crimes than their poor
counterparts in middle- or low-income neighborhoods, presumably because
of the relative deprivation and racial hostility they experience or because
they were more tempted by the greater opportunities for gain. Other
studies reviewed in Chapter 4 show that the family income of students or
the racial composition of a high school has little effect on the educational
aspirations and subsequent educational attainment of seniors, because the
positive effects on the aspirations of poor seniors in wealthy schools are
cancelled out by their lower grades and class standings.
Relatively little is known about neighborhood effects on some kinds of
behavior such as teenage crime, teenage sexual behavior, and the achieve-
ment of minority high school students-even when the socioeconomic or
racial composition of a neighborhood or school appear from the limited
existing research to be important. Almost nothing is known about other
important potential neighborhood effects- such as the effect of socioeco-
nomic mix on the cognitive growth of children before high school or on
high school graduation rates, or on the development of job-related skills
and attitudes toward working.
The Existence of an Urban Underclass
Although definitions of an urban underclass vary, the term is usually
applied to a set of people who suffer from more than just a lack of
income. Their problems are purportedly persistent rather than temporary,
usually including lack of participation in the labor force, reliance on public
assistance or the underground economy, broken homes, and children born
to unmarried mothers. These same problems, it is said, are likely to
be experienced by their children through some process of intergenerational
transmission. Members of the underclass live near one another in inner-city
neighborhoods and are isolated from mainstream society. Some analyses
OCR for page 258
258
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
attribute these problems to personal shortcomings of underclass members
that make them '`behaviorally dependent" and therefore unable to hold a
job or stay in school, stay married, or stay off welfare. Others stress the
lack of opportunities facing a group with less education and fewer skills
during a decade of slow economic growth (Wilson, 1987~. In either case, as
discussed in Chapter 2, determining the existence and extent of an urban
underclass in ghettos involves sorting out the relationships among ghetto
poverty, persistent and intergenerational poverty, and underclass behaviors.
Data adequate to determine the existence of an urban underclass do
not exist; decennial census data cannot settle the issue. Although high
levels of welfare receipt, low levels of labor force attachment, and other
characteristics of ghettos are consistent with the underclass hypothesis,
decennial census data on poverty concentration are cross-sectional rather
than longitudinal and are reported at the tract, not individual, level. It is
therefore impossible to use them to prove that there are individual-level
linkages among social pathologies and the concentration or persistence
of poverty. The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a
relatively new longitudinal survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census,
does not have a sample large enough to compare ghetto residents with
other metropolitan-area residents, although it may be possible to compare
all central-city residents with suburban and nonmetropolitan populations.
If plans to add census-tract information to the University of Michigan's
Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) are carried out, it will be easier
to investigate the question of an urban underclass.
Longitudinal analyses of PSID data have found that most persistently
poor people live outside the large cities of the Midwest and the Northeast
(Corcoran et al., 1985; Duncan, 1984~. In the period 196941978, for
example, only 2.2 percent of the U.S. population was persistently poor (i.e.,
living in families below the poverty line for eight years or more). Only 21
percent of persistently poor people lived in a county with a city of 500,000
population or more; one-third lived in a counter with no town of 10,000 or
more; more than two-thirds lived in the South.
Although most persistently poor people live outside large cities or in
the South, large urban areas probably have more than their share (Adams
et al., 1988~. Between 1974 and 1983, 5.2 percent of the population of the
core counties of large metropolitan areas lived in persistently poor families.)
Although this persistent poverty was disproportionately concentrated among
blacks, especially households headed by black women, persistently poor
iAlthough the 5.2 percent of the population of core counties of large metropolitan areas that
is persistently poor is relatively larger than the 2.2 percent that is persistently poor nationally,
the two figures are based on surveys taken in different time periods and thus are not strictly
comparable.
OCR for page 259
CONCLUSIONS
259
blacks were no more likely to live in areas with 40 percent or more poverty
than other poor blacks or even nonpoor blacks. (Persistently poor whites
were more likely to live in such high-poverty areas, but they accounted for
few of the persistently poor in urban areas.)
There were some favorable demographic changes in highly urban areas
in the 1970s: the negative effect of the increase in female-headed families
was more than offset by the positive effects of the decrease in the numbers
of large families and of families headed by persons with less than a high
school education. Nevertheless, poverty became more persistent after 1975:
the proportion of urban residents that escaped poverty each year, which
r--r -A --- - - -- r - r - - ~ ~
had increased from about 32 percent in 197() to 37 percent in 1Y75, dropped
to 23 percent in 1982 (poverty was defined as having family income below
125 percent of the federal poverty line; Adams et al., 1988~. This occurred
largely because the typical urban poor person was further below the poverty
line in 1982 than in 1970: the fraction of urban poor with incomes less than
three-quarters of the poverty line increased from 50 to 63 percent.
University of Michigan researchers and others have used longitudinal
data from the PSID and the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) to in-
vestigate the attitudinal and behavioral dimensions of poverty and welfare.
Most of these studies have found little evidence that attitudes cause poverty
or welfare dependence (Hill et al., 1985; O'Neill et al., 1984), although
studies using the NLS have tended to find that some attitudinal measures
toward work did have a significant relationship to subsequent success in the
labor market, and vice versa (Andrisani and Parnes, 1983~. Rather, eco-
nomic changes (getting or losing a job, marriage, or divorce) make people
feel more or less motivated, efficacious, optimistic about the future, etc.
(Corcoran et al., 1985~. Even NLS analyses find that attitudinal measures
are strongly shaped by major labor market events. However, due to small
sample sizes, these studies could not distinguish between poor people and
welfare recipients living in areas with 40 percent or more poverty and those
living elsewhere. It is therefore impossible to know if there are significant
differences in attitudes or behavior between the two groups.
Similarly, studies of how the children of families who were poor or
on welfare fared as adults have found that most do not go on welfare
themselves, although they are still somewhat more likely than others to
become welfare recipients (Duncan et al., 1988; Hill et al., 1985~. For
example, one study of a PSID sample of women looked at their welfare
status in two three-year periods: when they were 13 to 15 years old
and again when they were 21 to 23 years old. Nearly two-thirds of the
women raised in families dependent on welfare for all three years when
they were young teenagers did not receive any welfare themselves during
the three years when they were young adults; only 20 percent received
welfare during all of both three-year periods. However, only 3 percent of
OCR for page 260
260
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
the daughters of nonwelfare families received assistance during all three
years of young adulthood (Duncan et al., 1988~. These differences may
arise from unmeasured but systematic differences between individuals with
welfare backgrounds who end up on welfare and those who do not. For
example, their parents might be less educated, they might live in poorer
neighborhoods, or they might go to lower-quality schools. Studies of the
intergenerational transmission of poverty that attempt to control for these
differences have had conflicting results (Duncan et al., 1988)
CONCLUSIONS
On the basis of the findings summarized above, the committee reached
four major conclusions. First, recent trends in ghetto poverty are best un-
derstood for policy purposes as symptoms of broader economic and social
changes. For example, as we have seen, cross-tabular analysis of character-
istics associated with different degrees of change in the concentration of
poverty in different cities indicates that cities with rapid growth in concen-
tration also experienced increases in the poverty rate, while cities with slow
or negative growth in concentration simultaneously experienced reductions
in poverty; this association was observed even in cities with very high levels
of concentration. The multivariate analysis in Chapter 3 confirms that fa-
vorable economic trends in the metropolitan economy that is, reductions
in poverty rates had a positive impact on the economic fortunes of house-
holds in ghettos. Accordingly, the committee believes that developments in
the national economy are consequential in determining the extent of ghetto
poverty, a conclusion that has implications for demand-side macroeconomic
policies.
Second, many ghetto residents would fare poorly in any job market. The
analyses in Chapter 3 indicate that the characteristics of the population were
a factor in increasing poverty and unemployment in ghettos. In addition
to lacking education, skills, and work experience, many household heads
living in ghettos are women with young children who need extensive support
services, especially day care. The committee concludes that some ghetto
residents would not be able to take full advantage of tight labor markets;
this conclusion implies that education and training and other supply-side
policies may be important in reducing ghetto poverty and unemployment.
Third, the committee has documented some negative effects of living
in ghettos. While some members conclude that there are special problems
associated with living in such areas, others, citing the absence of convincing
empirical data, are less sure. In any event, currently available data are
insufficient to support a stronger finding at this time. Other factors affecting
ghetto residents, such as racial discrimination and inadequate education and
skills, are better understood at present. Nevertheless, the committee believes
OCR for page 261
CONCLUSIONS
261
that current antipoverty programs and policies meet with special problems in
ghettos. The fact that the concentration of poor people living in these
areas is higher than it is elsewhere may affect delivery of antipoverty
program benefits. For example, existing programs may be overwhelmed
by the greater number of poor people trying to obtain benefits. More
broadly, resources intended to combat poverty may not be as concentrated
as the poverty itself in ghettos. The committee thus concludes that the
delivery and therefore the effectiveness of current antipoverty programs
can be significantly undercut by ghetto poverty. The committee believes
that discriminatory barriers preventing mobility to better neighborhoods
should be deliberately undermined by federal policies and programs.
Fourth, additional research on the causes and effects of ghetto poverty is
essential to increasing the govemment's ability to design and administer policies
and programs that are more effective with respect to alleviating poverty and its
consequences.
In the next sections we discuss policy options that are based on these
conclusions.
Macroeconomic Policies
Ghetto poverty, like other types of poverty, could be reduced by
national demand-side policies that stimulate gains in economic productivity
and sustained economic growth. During the first two decades after World
War II, productivity rates and economic growth rose more rapidly and more
steadily than at any other time in the twentieth century (Levy, 1987~. As a
result, poverty rates in the United States were cut nearly in half (Gottschalk
and Danziger, 1984~. Since the early 1970s, economic productivity and
growth rates have averaged between 1 and 2 percent, gains in family
income have been small, and the hourly earnings of employees have actually
declined. Affected by the ups and downs of the business cycle, the poverty
rate has fluctuated around an average rate that has not changed significantly
since the early 1970s.
The poverty rate, which is sensitive to the unemployment rate, was
higher from 1973 until just recently than it was from World War II to
1973. The period after 1973 was one of slow economic growth and a sharp
increase in the rate of new labor market entrants-the postwar baby boom
cohort, women, and immigrants. In a persistently slack economy, those
with the fewest marketable skills, least education, minority status, and who
live in areas with outmoded industrial structures are the least likely to be
employed (Reischauer, 1987~. Sawhill (1986) estimates that reducing the
unemployment rate from 6 to 5.5 percent would reduce the number of poor
people by about 2.5 million. At least some of these would be poor people
living in ghettos, although the benefits of macroeconomic growth probably
OCR for page 262
262
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
would not apply proportionately to central cities and suburbs (see Chapter
3~.
There are limits to the extent to which demand-side policies will re-
duce poverty. Even if overall economic conditions improve, demographic
changes among the population in poverty, especially the growth of families
headed by single women, who are least helped by economic growth, will
keep poverty rates somewhat higher than they would have been even with
economic growth (0.1 percentage points a year, according to a simula-
tion by GottschaLk and Danziger, 1984~. The macroeconomic approach is
also limited by the effects of structural economic change affecting labor
markets the location of jobs and the levels of education and skill require-
ments. So, although a strong economy may be an essential component of
any effective antipoverty strategy, it is not sufficient.
Human Capital Investment
In many cases, ghetto residents are unprepared to take full advantage
of opportunities presented by economic growth. Additional resources and
supports should be devoted to helping this group become productive work-
ers, whom employers will hire at wages high enough to make economic
self-sufficiency possible.
Evidence of the importance of such a strategy is provided by looking
again at the characteristics of ghetto residents. Whether or not residence
in a high-poverty area in itself contributes to disadvantage, these areas
contain disproportionate numbers of people who are detached from the
labor force and poorly prepared to enter it. They have few positive role
models. As Chapter 2 documents, relatively few of the adults living in
ghettos are employed. Although the median years of schooling in these
areas improved during the 197Qs, it was barely 10 years in 1980 (see
Chapter 3~. In cities with high rates of Hispanic immigration, substantial
proportions of ghetto residents have only limited proficiency in English.
The typical nonworking adult in these areas is not an expenenced, skilled,
and literate laborer or craftworker who lost a well-paying manufacturing
job when the plant moved south. Many are young single mothers or high
school dropouts who have worked intermittently, if at all (Chapter 2~. At
least some of the adult males may have records of crime or participation
in the underground economy. Many are likely to have difficulty obtaining
and keeping adequately paid employment, even in a tight labor market.
These characteristics suggest that policies aimed at enhancing the
employability and productivity of ghetto residents would effectively com-
plement policies focused on employment opportunities. Such policies need
not be specially developed for, or targeted on, ghetto residents; they can
OCR for page 263
CONCLUSIONS
2~3
instead grow out of broader-based efforts to develop the human capital of
poor and disadvantaged people. Such policies include:
· Investments in education, including preschool education, compen-
satory basic skills education for disadvantaged elementary and sec-
onda~v students. dropout Prevention Programs. and Programs for
.
.
~~~--I ~ ~ --I-- I- -- r--o~ ~ ~
youth that facilitate the transition from school to work;
Investments in health, especially teenage pregnancy prevention,
prenatal care, nutrition, childhood immunization and other preven-
tive health programs, and prevention and treatment of substance
abuse;
Employment and training programs for adults, including job
search, job matching, job seeking and employability skills training,
specific skills training, work experience, and supported work.
Careful analyses and evaluations of such programs indicate that at
least some of them Head Start, WIC, Job Corps, and Supported Work,
for example are demonstrably effective and deliver benefits that exceed
their costs. (See, for Head Start, Aitken et al., 1985; for Chapter 1,
Kennedy et al., 1986; for teenage pregnancy prevention, Hayes, 1987;
for the Job Corps, Supported Work, Betsey et al., 1985; for Supported
Work, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 1980, Hollister
et al., 1984; for state work-welfare experiments, Gueron, 1987.) Some
programs, for example many of the work-welfare demonstrations conducted
by the states, seem to be most effective with the most disadvantaged
clients (Gueron, 1987~. Programs like these, which are apparently effective
in improving the health, skill levels, employability, and productivity of
disadvantaged children and adults, are obvious candidates for adoption by
governments interested in attacking urban poverty. They are logical and
perhaps necessary complements to policies directed at overall employment
and economic growth.
These programs should be undertaken with caution, however, for two
reasons. First, they will not work miracles. Although carefully evaluated
programs have been shown to be effective, the benefits are modest. Careful
evaluations of effective work-welfare programs show earnings advantages
of only a few hundred dollars and declines in welfare dependence of only
a few percentage points for program participants compared with controls
(Gueron, 1987~. Evaluations of even the most effective preschool programs
show modest improvements in achievement and school attendance that
translate into small earnings gains among adults (Barrueta-Clement et al.,
1984~. Even the most effective of the programs that have been tested
and a great many variants have been tried will at best achieve small but
steady improvements in economic self-sufficiency, not dramatic reductions
in poverty or welfare receipt.
OCR for page 264
264
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
Second, effective programs often cost more money than elected officials
have been prepared to raise. The evaluations suggest that net benefits of
the effective programs are positive over the long run. But not all programs
that are tried will be effective, even if the best current models are adopted.
Even the effective programs cost money in the short term; they cannot be
financed by current-year welfare savings. Governments intending to dent
the problem must be prepared to invest current resources in the hope of
long-term payoffs. Investments in education, health, and employment and
training programs are an important part of a policy that addresses poverty,
including ghetto poverty.
Increasing Mobility
Some findings reported in this study that being poor in a ghetto may
have a negative effect, and that some federal policies have had an indirect
effect of concentrating the poor and minorities in central cities suggest
that the spatial implications of government policies, especially the effects
of government programs on poverty concentrations, must be considered
carefully. For example, poor people living in ghettos may be less likely to
benefit from federal antipoverty programs, because these programs may not
be designed to deal with such a high proportion of poor people in a given
area. Similarly, poor people who live in ghettos may be farther away from
services and jobs than they would be if they lived in other neighborhoods
and may be less able to benefit from them.
Therefore, federal policies and programs should seek to eliminate bar-
riers to residential mobility through full enforcement of fair housing, equal
access, and other antidiscrimination laws and regulations, enabling people
to leave ghettos if they choose, for example through programs of hous-
ing vouchers and fair-share housing construction throughout metropolitan
areas.
A strategy to enhance the mobility of ghetto residents cannot, however,
solve the problem of ghetto poverty by itself. It depends on where the poor
people who move end up. First, simply hastening the emptying out of
ghettos through residential mobility would not in itself have much impact
on the fortunes of the people who had lived there. They would continue to
have problems no matter where they lived, because they typically face the
liabilities of low levels of education, skills, and work experience; poor health
and disabilities; teenage and single parenthood; and racial discrimination.
They would still have problems with access to affordable health care, day
care, and transportation.
Second, those left behind, even temporarily, face serious transition
problems. In the 1970s, despite relatively high rates of residential mobility
OCR for page 265
CONCLUSIONS
265
from ghettos, resulting in substantially fewer ghetto residents, social and
economic conditions among those remaining deteriorated badly. Public
services also probably deteriorated and crime may have increased, although
there are no data on these points.
Third, increased mobility may have the unintended effect of spreading
ghetto poverty to adjacent areas. Most of the growth in concentrated
poverty between 1970 and 1980 occurred through the addition of new
ghetto neighborhoods in a few cities, and most of those were contiguous
lo the ghettos that existed in 1970. These poor people tend to move
short distances to areas similar to those they left. Many migrating from
ghettos probably ended up in nearby locations, which helped to turn them
into ghettos, too (also some previously nonpoor residents probably became
poor during the 1970s).
Because of these problems with and limits to enhanced mobility as
a strategy for reducing ghetto poverty, the committee stresses the impor-
tance of macroeconomic policies and human capital investment in reducing
ghetto poverty. Mobility means little unless it leads to a higher~uality
social environment and to improved economic opportunity. This could be
accomplished either by enabling poor ghetto residents to move beyond
contiguous neighborhoods to stable, higher-income areas, or by stabiliz-
ing contiguous neighborhoods by consciously encouraging the building of
working-class and mixed-income housing that could absorb out-migrants
from ghettos and otherwise attempting to keep them from turning into new
ghettos, or both. The specific policy mix would vary, because conditions
such as patterns of land use and composition of the building stock vary by
city.
Factors that prevent many poor and minority Americans from relocat-
ing to areas of job growth and opportunity include, in addition to poverty
itself: overt and illegal housing discrimination that denies poor people the
choice to purchase or rent units in areas near employment opportunities;
restrictive zoning, such as minimum lot size requirements that effectively
limit new housing to those with moderately high incomes; racial steering,
in which real estate agents avail only certain housing choices to low-income
groups; and fiscal zoning, in which communities zone land predominantly
for high tax-yielding land uses, such as commercial-office development,
at the expense of underzoning for housing. Most poor people living in
ghettos are black or Hispanic, and many heads of household are female.
The latest evidence on residential discrimination indicates that it declined
very little in the 197Qs and hardly at all in the large cities experiencing the
greatest concentrations of poverty (see Chapter 6~. It even increased in
some (Massey and Denton, 1987; Farley and Wilger, 1987~. At a minimum,
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266
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
federal policies should be pursued that vigorously enforce antidiscrimina-
tion laws and uphold the constitutional right of citizens to move as they
choose.
In pursuing a policy of enhancing mobility, policy makers need not
decide that poor people should be actively removed from ghetto neighbor-
hoods; policy makers need agree only that the actions of the government
should not make leaving more difficult or more costly than staying. This
means that government policies and programs to help low-income and
poverty households should not encourage concentration but should permit
geographic mobility.
Geographically targeted support programs for the poor must be eval-
uated very carefully, so that they do not have the unintended, yet perverse,
effect of keeping them isolated from job opportunities elsewhere. ~ the
extent that the availability of social welfare support systems-e.g., welfare
centers, family counseling offices, health clinics, and missions anchor the
poor in areas of economic decline and inhibit them from entering society's
mainstream, federal programs should be as locationally neutral as possi-
ble. At the least, they should not introduce incentives to remain in areas
characterized by persistent poverty (Kasarda, 1988, 1985~.
There is evidence, for example, that high-rise public housing built
under previous housing policies had the effect of concentrating poverty in
certain areas. Higher welfare benefit levels in states in declining regions
may have had the unintended effect of discouraging migration to areas
with growing economies but lower welfare benefits. Other policies, such as
government-supported fixed-rail mass transportation, which were supposed
to increase the mobility of the poor, have not had the intended effect (see
Chapter 6~.
In principle, housing programs should provide benefits that are port-
able, either through supply-oriented programs diffused throughout the
metropolitan areas or, more directly, through demand-oriented programs,
or both. User-side transportation subsidies for poor people, if they are to
be enacted, should facilitate movement to sites where jobs are profitably
located, be they inner-city poverty areas or suburban areas. Job-subsidy
and training programs should be used to direct business activity to sites
where the activity will be most efficient and profitable.
All urban poverty initiatives do not necessarily have to be spatially
neutral. Other urban dilemmas, such as traffic congestion or spot pollu-
tion, call for initiatives that encourage spatial redistribution, such as the
coordination of job growth and housing growth in a particular district. The
problem of ghetto poverty, however, is one area in which place-oriented
policies provide few, if any, additional benefits for the poor, and that could
potentially have the unfortunate effect of inhibiting their mobility.
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CONCLUSIONS
2~7
RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
The committee was not able to study the effects of federal programs
on poverty concentration in great detail, and there are knowledge gaps in
the literature even in issues that were carefully examined. The knowledge
base for policy making needs to be improved.
First, the Bureau of the Census should continue to produce statistics
on urban poverty concentration from the decennial censuses, as it did
for the 1970 and 1980 censuses (Bureau of the Census, 1973, 1985), to
enable researchers to track trends in ghetto poverty over a longer period
of time. For 1990, the bureau should publish tables of data on residents
of 40-percent poverty areas for an expanded set of variables, by poverty
status, race, and ethnic origin. These additional variables should include
information on family structure; income and income sources (including
public assistance); education; labor force status, t~rpe, condition; and cost-
of-housing characteristics. The 1970 and 1980 data on the same set of
variables should be made available to researchers on public-use tapes.
In addition, the Bureau of the Census should provide data on neigh-
borhood characteristics in public-use tapes for various surveys, including,
for example, the Current Population Survey, the American Housing Survey,
and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. This was done for
the 1970 decennial survey, but, due to problems with the way the neighbor-
hoods were defined, little use was made of the data. The current interest
in the persistently poor and the possible development of an underclass will
ensure their use at this time.
Second, federal agencies with an interest in concentrated poverty and
dependence (e.g., research programs in the departments of Health and
Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Educa-
tion) should sponsor methodologically sound studies of neighborhood or
contextual effects on the social and economic behavior of residents of poor
neighborhoods. These studies should include neighborhoods with extreme
characteristics (to detect nonlinear effects) and should examine important
outcome variables that are now understudied (e.g., cognitive development
of children in elementary school).
1b facilitate research on neighborhood effects (and on other effects
on poverty and dependence), federal research programs should subsidize
the addition of spatial variables (i.e., inner-city versus suburban versus
nonmetropolitan location) and contextual variables (i.e., census tract char-
acteristics) to longitudinal panel surveys (e.g., the Panel Study of Income
Dynamics, the National Longitudinal Survey).
Finally, the departments of Housing and Urban Development, ~ans-
portation, Commerce, Treasury, Labor, Education, and Health and Hu-
man Services should evaluate the locational impacts of their policies and
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268
INNER-CITY POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
programs on poverty including housing, transportation, education and
training, health, economic development, and public assistance programs.
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CONCLUSIONS
269
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
ghetto poverty
