Laying Out the Problem

Paul Jargowsky

The reason that we all came to this conference is that we can see what is happening to our cities. Areas of poverty have been spreading, and large areas in many cities are being abandoned. We're very concerned about the effects on the residents, especially the children, of the social and economic isolation in these neighborhoods; and, of course, the burden is borne disproportionately by African Americans and Hispanics. I'm going to describe the poverty issues primarily, and Nancy Denton will be addressing some of the segregation issues.

How prevalent is this problem of high-poverty neighborhoods? How many are there? How many people are affected? Is the problem growing or not? Measuring this phenomenon at the national level, I've used census tracts as proxies for neighborhoods, and a definition of a high-poverty area as an area where the poverty rate is in excess of 40 percent. It's a somewhat arbitrary definition, but when you look at neighborhoods that fit that definition, they tend to be the neighborhoods that people are most concerned about. A high-poverty area is not identical to what some people might call an "underclass" area. There may be many of these neighborhoods in which the stereotypical notions of an underclass are not true; but when people talk about these things, "the tangle of pathology" and the "underclass," they always say that these things arise within the context of economic deprivation.

In 1990, out of 45,000 census tracts nationally, about 2800 had poverty rates in excess of 40 percent. Eight and a half million people were living in these areas at that time. Approximately half of the residents of these areas were African American. Roughly one fourth were Hispanic, in the South and West primarily of Mexican origin, and in the Northeast, particularly Puerto Rican. About one fourth of the residents nationwide were non-Hispanic whites. It would be a mistake, however, to think that these neighborhoods were integrated somehow. Individual poverty neighborhoods tend to be fairly segregated. Of the 2800 census tracts, approximately 800 were over 90 percent black; another large chunk have very few black residents. There are some that have a mixture of groups.

Is this phenomenon growing over time? The number of census tracts that have high poverty has risen from about 1000 in 1970 up to about 2800 in 1990, an increase of 144 percent over two decades, in a fixed set of metropolitan areas. In terms of population, in 1970, 4 million people lived in these areas, and now it has doubled to close to 8 million in these same metropolitan areas. What percentage of the population lives in high poverty areas? Overall, it's gone from 3 percent of these metropolitan areas to 4.5 percent, but the propensity to live in such areas varied dramatically by race and ethnicity, so that fewer than 2 percent of whites live in high poverty areas, whereas among African Americans it has risen from 14.4 percent to 17.4 percent. Among Hispanics, the absolute numbers have increased, but not the percentage. What percentage of the poor also live in concentrated poverty? About one fourth of the African American poor lived in high poverty areas in 1970, and by 1990 that had risen to one third. In this same period of time and group of cities, the overall poverty rate among African Americans was basically flat representing a separate dimension, the spatial concentration of the poor.

What factors account for this rapid growth in poor neighborhoods? First, racial segregation. If we didn't have the kind of racial segregation that we have in this country, we would not have very many concentrations of poverty of this sort. Overall since 1970, racial segregation has been increasing, albeit very slowly. So in terms of the growth of these neighborhoods, we have to look at some other factors as well. By far the strongest single factor that accounts for how many people live in ghettos in a metropolitan area is the overall opportunity structure, the income of the residents of the overall metro economy. That explains much of the existence and the prevalence of these high poverty areas, but not all of it. In fact, the area covered by high-poverty concentration is expanding much faster than the population in these areas. These neighborhoods are emptying out. In Milwaukee, looked at over this twenty year period, the high-poverty area was expanding in concentric rings, while losing population. These areas were expanding because the poverty rate was going up in Milwaukee, but also because non-poor people were moving out faster than poor people. The high-poverty area was losing population, and the areas around it were, too, in a flight effect. Every city that I've looked at seems to have a similar dynamic, though it is not always this dramatic. George Galster has called this "spatial suicide."

These issues really are linked to what is going on in the broader metropolitan areas, that's why this conference is so important. Twenty percent of all poor children live in these high-poverty areas. They have to cope both with their own poverty, and with growing up in a neighborhood and an environment in which they are surrounded by poverty, and all the social problems that go with it. I look forward to hearing from all of you about what we can do about it.

Nancy Denton

Keep in mind all that Paul Jargowsky has just told you about poverty and also start thinking about residential segregation, particularly segregation by race, because it is those two problems that are so important in the creation of the problems that we see in the cities: both the problems of the residents of the poor communities themselves, and the problem of what is happening to these cities. Can we have cities that are going downhill and being abandoned except by poor people and people of color? Those are two separate issues, but they are connected through the forces of residential segregation and poverty.

We need to reflect on the fact that in 1993 Douglas Massey and I could write a book called American Apartheid. We have to examine this feeling that it is natural for blacks and whites to live apart. We tend to come to solutions to our racial, urban, and poverty problems within this segregated context. We don't realize that the segregated context was created, not a "natural" outgrowth of how cities had to develop. It was created by actors, by the government, by real estate brokers, by bankers, by prejudice, by discrimination, by bigotry, by violence. A whole series of political and municipal players created this structure. It is not an accident that the cities that are the most segregated cities are old, formerly industrialized cities that are politically ringed in by other cities that control their own zoning, their own land-use, and who gets access to their communities. If these surrounding municipalities even have a public housing authority, they claim its use entirely for their own residents. Even in cities where segregation is declining by minute amounts, it would take three-quarters of a century for the segregation scores in some of our northeastern and midwestern industrialized cities to reach the moderate level of segregation defined by about 60 on a 100 point scale.

We have to begin to fight the notion that segregation is normal, and explore how we are going to dismantle it, before the situation gets even worse than it is now. Paul Jargowsky just showed you that it is getting worse at a very quick pace. The number of high poverty areas is increasing, the borderline areas around them are growing in numbers as well. He also told you that 33 percent of poor African Americans in 1990 live in these concentrated poverty areas. Concentrated poverty areas are created, Doug Massey and I argue, through the forces of segregation. Residential segregation is not the sole cause, but it is an enabling force. Changes in levels of segregation can radically change the poverty concentration in neighborhoods, bringing it up to 50, even 60, percent. How that happens, how segregation works, is that a group of people who are identifiable, particularly by their skin color, are limited, over the course of a century, or at least over the last fifty years, in their ability to spatially move in the urban environment. This is accomplished through steering, discrimination, insurance redlining, and if they succeed in clearing these hurdles, through meeting them with violence or hostility in the formerly closed residential areas. Even when it's not violence in the same sense as in the 1920s and 1930s, when houses were burned and people were actually killed, it's still violence: it's cross burning, it's taunting, it's racial slurs, and general acts that make life uncomfortable for that new family. If the new family persists in that neighborhood, because they want to follow the American dream of spatial mobility, then the majority residents have the ultimate response: they can leave, and the neighborhood will become all minority residents, with the housing values dropping as the majority of buyers remove themselves from the market.

Ninety-four percent of poor whites live out in the community with the rest of us, not in concentrated poverty neighborhoods. This level of segregation is not a neutral force. We all know that where you live determines not only what your house looks like, it determines where your kids go to school, what kind of kids your kids play with, the quality of the school and other government services, how much public transportation you have, whether your neighbors have jobs or not, hence whether they can provide access to their own employment network. It determines your wealth accumulation, since most of Americans' wealth is in their homes. A recent study of Black Wealth/White Wealth by Oliver and Shapiro showed that African Americans have almost no wealth. This is not because they didn't work hard, it's not because they didn't save their money, it's not totally because their rate of homeownership is lower than whites', which it is. It's because they bought houses in areas where the houses never appreciated significantly. They missed out on the great real estate boom in which the $20,000 Levittown house that was built after World War II now sells for $170,000. That's just unearned income that whites get to have. Because of the forces of segregation, and because Bill Levitt said when he was building Levittown that he wasn't going to let blacks live there, blacks never had a chance at that kind of wealth accumulation.

So segregation is not neutral, and it is very powerful in its effects. We have to start to focus more on the structural effects of segregation, and less on the behavior of individuals within poor communities. Too much of the analysis of concentrated poverty, and of the poverty of African Americans in particular, focuses on the individual behavior of the people. None of us in any ethnic or racial category think that some of these behaviors are good. If you go into these neighborhoods and talk to the residents, they are not happy that their children or grandchildren are having babies as young teenagers, or dealing drugs, even if the drug money helps the family out a little bit. They don't think this is a good way to live. The environment comes around and changes how they define what their options are. They don't think they have any options. When there are no other options, some of these things don't look that bad. Babies are cute and fun. So the fact that there are out of wedlock births is not necessarily the source of the problem. The source of the problem is something else. The out of wedlock births are just a symptom.

We need to reorient our thinking toward the cities, toward poor people, and toward people who live in concentrated poverty areas. One of the things that I'm reading right now is a conference volume from Morehouse College on the work of Gunnar Myrdal on the race question in America. Myrdal was insistent that we look at our values as social scientists. He thought it impossible to be completely objective and value-free. He attributed part of the American dilemma regarding race to the fact that white Americans in particular were trying to compromise their values. They had this ideal of an American dream in which everyone should be able to work toward and achieve a good life, but on the race issue they don't live up to this. So they are in a constant position of having to compromise on their values.

Too often, when thinking of poor communities of color, we emphasize poverty, we emphasize color. We have to remember that these are people with many of the same dreams and aspirations as the rest of us, but who are living in a different structure from the rest of us. On this question of white value conflict, Myrdal said, "When people try to deny, to the outside world and to themselves, that they live in moral compromise, and that they ceaselessly and habitually violate their own ideals, they are customarily brought to falsify their perception of reality in order to conceal this from themselves and others. About this I first became truly aware as a scholar through my work with An American Dilemma." As we go through our discussion of strategies for helping low-income communities of color, it would do us all good to keep this in mind. How many times, when we say we'll solve this problem by putting these people over there, keeping my world over here, are we saying that's the best solution as a way of coping with this value conflict Myrdal is talking about?