In his book Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson uses the phrase “The Abandoned.”1 Our nation can justly celebrate the progress of African American achievement since World War II, but there is a distinct, and awful, exception: the opening of a yawning gap between those who have made it and those who have not. Racism and racial discrimination have hardly disappeared, but for some millions of African Americans, the problem is one of class as well as race.
The abandoned in Robinson’s rendering are the people many Americans think of first when they think about poverty—the African American poor who live in the inner city. But the abandoned of our nation are not only African American, and they are not only residents of inner cities. They are Native Americans on reservations; former coal miners in Appalachia; seasonal farmworkers in California, Florida, and elsewhere; sharecroppers in Alabama and Mississippi; and day laborers in city after city.
My concern in this chapter is primarily the abandoned who live in the inner city, disproportionately but far from exclusively African American: people who live amid conditions of concentrated, persistent, and intergenerational poverty far more than the rest of the poor. Robinson’s examples are the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans—which temporarily came into broader public view because of Hurricane Katrina—and neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River in the District of Columbia.
The inner-city poor are a fairly small minority of the poor overall, but they are the central players in the political drama about poverty, especially those who are African American. These are the quintessential places where race, poverty, and politics intersect, with awful results. They are places of continual human tragedy: violent streets, distressingly few youth graduating from high school, prisons and jails filled with young men from the area, too many teenagers having babies and large numbers of women raising children by themselves, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, children abused physically and sexually, staggering AIDS rates—the list goes on.
There are success stories, to be sure: young people who do squeeze through the inverted funnel that allows a few to make it out. The neighborhoods are far from monolithic. If 40 percent of residents are poor, 60 percent are not, and many of the poor are working, too. There are stalwart residents who stay in the community and provide leadership and a measure of stability. But the contrasts between high-poverty and low-poverty neighborhoods are stark on every dimension, whether it is the number of people not completing high school, the number married or never married, the number unemployed, or any of many other parameters. Somehow, though, we do not see the linkages that tie everything together and cry out for an all-points response. In its totality it is catastrophic.
What I see as catastrophic others label a massive failure of personal responsibility. Who can disagree with the proposition that people have to behave responsibly? That isn’t the question. The question is what we can do to help people take responsibility for themselves and their children on a more consistent basis. Children being born in the inner city today are not born into the Garden of Eden. The original sin occurred long ago. They are growing up in a toxic environment that poses formidable odds against their success or even their sheer survival. Unraveling the tangle of problems will not occur because someone snaps his fingers and says the people of the inner city have to act responsibly.
This is tough stuff. Whether we are talking about the inner city, Appalachia, or Indian reservations, we are talking about too many poor people all living in the same place and for a long time—long enough for behaviors to be passed on from one generation to the next and reinforced among peers in each generation as it comes along.
One has only to look at the foster care rolls in Washington, D.C., to see how hard it is. Seventy-six percent of the intake of D.C.’s child welfare protection agency in 2009 were children born to teen parents or to women who had their first child as a teen. “Why do the mothers not know what they are doing to their own life prospects and the prospects of the children to whom they give birth?” I asked a brilliant young lawyer I know who represents these girls.
She said, “They think they’re not good at anything but believe that they will be good mothers.”
“But don’t they know the trouble they’re headed for?” I asked.
She said, “Their mothers had them out of wedlock and in some cases their grandmothers had their mothers out of wedlock, and many of their friends are also having children out of wedlock.” This is tough stuff.
It doesn’t help to talk about a “culture of poverty.” But it also doesn’t help to gloss over the statistics and the behaviors they represent. The behaviors have to be addressed not with more punitive and pejorative approaches—we’ve had enough of those—but with answers that combine structural reform with one-on-one approaches that encourage and support personal responsibility.
A host of changes needs to happen in order to create better support for positive behaviors. Getting good behaviors is difficult without fairly consistent incentives. Some of what we need to do is structural. Better schools, real opportunities for college and careers, more people working, increased incomes, a fairer criminal justice system, safer streets, good health care, and decent social services are all important. But the structural changes aren’t enough. The behaviors have to be addressed.
Are there things we can do to promote personal and parental responsibility? Absolutely. Positive role models are vital, especially for young people. Parents, especially young parents, can learn how to be better parents through classes at their children’s child care centers and schools. Home visiting can be valuable if it is done competently and on a wholly voluntary basis. The Parent-Child Home Program, which serves seven thousand families annually in 150 communities in fourteen states, is a good example. HIPPY, which I discuss later in this chapter, is another. Schools can teach nonviolence and the importance of civic participation. Churches can play a more active role by mobilizing parishioners to be tutors and mentors. Community and neighborhood leaders of all kinds have an obligation to play a constructive role.
This is an area where I think liberals and conservatives have been talking past each other. To call for personal responsibility is not to “blame the victim.” No one succeeds in life without taking personal responsibility, but the tools of opportunity need to exist as well. And we need to broaden the conversation.
The issues here are ones of both race and class. Insofar as we are talking about the African American community, we should be clear: while the whole society has an obligation to do far more, the African American community has a special obligation to confront the issues of class in its own ranks. Too much of the abandoning is being done by other African Americans—some of it proactively and some by dereliction of civic duty. Make no mistake: there are African American heroes working hard and making a difference in every neighborhood and in every walk of life. There are heroes who are teaching and mentoring children, building houses, helping ex-offenders to break through the monumental barriers they face, and on and on. But there are bad facts, too. Too many of the teachers who are failing poor African American children are themselves African American. Too many police who are arresting and prison guards who are guarding African American young people with what I would politely call excessive zeal are themselves African American. Too many of the workers at the welfare office who are turning African American applicants away when they could do otherwise are themselves African American. In general, too many African Americans who are doing better see the poor people in their own community as the “other.”
So the central issue explored in this chapter is the issue of place—too many poor people living in one locality. It is not an issue unique to one race or ethnicity, and it exists in rural areas as well as cities, but in this chapter I focus mainly on the inner city. Poverty produces a lot of bad outcomes, but they are not nearly as terrible either qualitatively or quantitatively as they are when the poverty is concentrated. The poverty in inner cities, in Appalachia, in the Black Belt of the South, and on Indian reservations is more persistent and more intergenerational and therefore even harder to tackle than poverty generally.
An up-to-the-minute picture of inner-city concentrated poverty is hard to draw, but the situation is clearly worse than it was a decade ago. After 2000, the census made major changes in its methodology and no longer collects decennial information about income, race, and ethnicity broken down by census tract, apparently for budgetary reasons. The more recent information comes from the American Community Survey (ACS), which presents a rolling average from 2005–9. It is based on small sample sizes that experts find less reliable, but it tells us pretty clearly that, like poverty generally and deep poverty in particular, concentrated poverty has worsened since 2000.
The 2000 picture was quite striking, in a good way. Urban Institute expert Thomas Kingsley called it “astonishing.” The number of poor people living in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped significantly compared to 1990. The proportion that was African American also went down. The only areas in the country that saw notable increases were in California and the Southwest, and to a more modest extent in the Northeast. The reason for the overall improvement, quite obviously, was the hot economy of the late 1990s.2
Census tracts (neighborhoods and areas of about four thousand people) with poverty at 40 percent or above are what is generally thought of as concentrated poverty. Concentrated poverty rose steadily from 1970 through 1990 and then dropped in the 1990s. The share of the metropolitan poor living in places of concentrated poverty went from 13 to 17 percent between 1980 and 1990, and then dropped back to 12 percent in 2000. Those in large urban areas were about 46 percent black, 37 percent Hispanic, and 11 percent non-Hispanic white.3
A recent Brookings Institution analysis concluded that the number of poor people living in concentrated poverty in metropolitan areas went up by 34.5 percent from 2000 to the years 2005–9, and was probably much higher by 2010.4 It nearly doubled in the Midwest and rose by a third in the South, while the Northeast and the West were generally unchanged. The number of high-poverty census tracts went up by 54 percent in the suburbs, compared to an increase of 18 percent in the cities. The Brookings analysis suggests that overall we are nearly back to 1990 levels, although there has been a substantial change in the location of the problem.
Washington, D.C., has one of the highest proportions of census tracts with concentrated poverty. The poverty level in Ward 8, the poorest in the city, went from 27 percent in both 1980 and 1990 to 36 percent in 2000 (which ought to be a fact of far greater concern locally than has been the actual case), to 35 percent for 2005–9. The deterioration during the 1990s is especially of concern, since that was a “good” decade for poverty nationally.
A look at states with high percentages of concentrated poverty reveals the racial and ethnic mix involved: southern states with African Americans, West Virginia with whites, South Dakota with Native Americans, Arizona and New Mexico with Latinos and Native Americans, California and New York with African Americans and Latinos.5
High-poverty neighborhoods in the West and Southwest look different from those typical of the rest of the country. For example, City Heights in San Diego—the site of a major neighborhood revitalization initiative originally spearheaded by the late Sol Price (founder of Price Clubs)—is 57 percent Latino, 18 percent Asian, 13 percent black (including the second-largest Somali population in the United States), 8 percent white, and 4 percent other.6 City Heights is distinctive in another way, one that is often the case with high-poverty neighborhoods that aren’t African American: it is heavily immigrant, and that means it has a high turnover. People move out as quickly as they can. It’s still a place of concentrated poverty, but many of the poor who live there are not the same people from one year or decade to the next.
The fundamental strategic question of this chapter is what we need to do to deconcentrate the poverty of the inner cities. Should we ideally be trying to get everyone out of the inner city, dispersed into racially and economically integrated neighborhoods throughout metropolitan areas? Or should we try to raise up the inner city so that it works as a healthy community with the vast majority of its residents steadily employed? Or, as I believe is the case, is there a “mixed” strategy that pursues both goals and gives people a genuine choice about where they will live?
If the problems are not new, neither are the efforts to solve them.
The inner city was at the forefront of concerns about race in the 1960s. As Dr. King and so many others worked courageously and nonviolently to end apartheid in the South, violence fueled by impatience over joblessness and discrimination was appearing elsewhere, finally exploding in Watts in the summer of 1965. It was almost certainly not coincidental that the Watts rebellion began eleven days after President Johnson signed the historic Voting Rights Act. The new law meant less than nothing to young people in inner cities who felt hemmed in, physically and otherwise, with no prospect for escape.
In November 1965, Senator Kennedy asked me and my colleague Adam Walinsky to work on ideas for addressing poverty in the inner cities. He had spoken out strongly after the riots, but now he wanted to follow up with specific proposals. He had denounced the violence, but he also believed that urban poverty raised profound questions of economic justice—in his view, the major civil rights challenge facing the nation after the fight to dismantle American apartheid.
The segregation of American cities had a long history. Going north and west in the Great Migration beginning roughly at the end of World War I, African Americans had for decades found themselves directed to particular neighborhoods whether they wanted to be there or not. Public policy and private discrimination worked in tandem to bring this about. Overt federal policy as well as banking predilections made it impossible for African Americans to buy or rent housing outside of the segregated areas. They could not get mortgages even in the segregated neighborhoods, except from the tiny African American–owned banks that existed here and there. With few exceptions, the only African Americans able to purchase homes were those who could pay cash (with consequences for asset-building that last to this day). Public housing location decisions also reinforced the segregation.
Until the late 1960s, the segregated neighborhoods, poor as they were, were communities where business owners, doctors, lawyers, teachers, preachers, and morticians all lived side by side along with everyone else. Unemployment was higher than in the white community, but some factory jobs and other manual labor were available, although the economic framework had begun to fray after World War II with the return of veterans reclaiming their position in the labor market. And some neighborhoods were destroyed by the urban renewal policies of the 1950s (“Negro removal,” as it was termed in the African American community). Nonetheless, until the 1960s, there was (at least as people who grew up there think of it now) a sense of community and stability, segregated as it was.
Things started to deteriorate economically in the 1960s. Even as the civil rights movement was dismantling American apartheid, the economics of the inner city began to get worse. The economic changes in the bigger world outside hit the inner city the hardest. Unemployment was rampant, especially among young people. Their anger boiled over in Watts and in inner cities across the country.
Adam and I came up with ideas for three speeches, to be delivered by Kennedy at three venues where he was scheduled to speak in January 1966. They had two major themes: how to bring about racial and economic desegregation throughout metropolitan areas and how to revitalize neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in inner cities.
Racial and economic desegregation were vitally important but also difficult to achieve. As for neighborhood revitalization, Kennedy laid out an idea that Adam had recommended. Outside funding and investment, both public and private, would support economic development and the upgrading of housing and community facilities. The visionary part of the idea was that jobs could be created for local people to work on improving their own housing and their own communities. At the start of the first speech in the trilogy, Kennedy said his reason for speaking was “to suggest that our purpose to help the Northern Negro must pervade every plan we make for the future of our cities.”7
Perhaps sooner than he anticipated, Kennedy saw an opportunity to put the neighborhood revitalization idea into practice. One evening, a month or so after delivering the three speeches, he met with leaders of the predominantly African American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Their mood was one of urgency. Watts was much on their mind and they were worried about what would happen if nothing was done to reduce the high levels of joblessness and poverty in their own backyard. They challenged Kennedy to help them.
Kennedy outlined his plan and—after getting a positive reaction from his audience and others with whom he subsequently spoke—decided to proceed. In the following months he flew to New York two or even three times a week to work on bringing the project to life. There was extensive community wrangling as people pushed to get a piece of the action, and there were protracted negotiations with Mayor John Lindsay, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and key business and financial leaders over what they and other outside actors would do to help.
When the dust finally settled, the result was the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Led by Franklin Thomas, who later headed the Ford Foundation, it did not feature Adam Walinsky’s idealistic image of sweat equity rebuilding the neighborhood, but it nonetheless contained a most ambitious idea: an inside-outside partnership that would revitalize a deeply troubled place, combining, as Robert Kennedy said at its dedication, “the best of community action with the best of the private-enterprise system.” Its work, still going on today, was to build and renovate housing, finance home ownership, promote economic development, and sponsor arts and cultural activities.
Equally important, Kennedy and his senior colleague from the state, Republican Senator Jacob Javits, succeeded in amending the Economic Opportunity Act—the war on poverty legislation—to authorize federal funding for initiatives like the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. These funds, distinctive in that proposals for their use could be tailored to the particular needs of a revitalizing neighborhood, seeded dozens of similar endeavors around the country during the decade or so that they were available.
With the addition of significant funding from the Ford Foundation and other sources, the result today is more than two thousand community development corporations (CDCs), as well as numerous other inner-city development organizations and outside entities that help finance their activities. Organizations such as the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, Enterprise Community Partners, NeighborWorks America, and their many individual local counterparts have made a tangible and important difference in building and rehabilitating housing for low-income people and promoting economic development in low-income neighborhoods.
Was Bedford-Stuyvesant a success? Yes and no. Yes, for sure, in the sense of tangible results in the neighborhood: 2,200 units of housing built or renovated, mortgage financing for nearly 1,500 homeowners, $475 million in investments in the neighborhood, 20,000 people placed in jobs, the Billie Holiday Theatre, and so on. But no in the sense that the sum of all this isn’t nearly enough. To the extent that we thought in the heady spirit of the time that one super-duper community development corporation could do it all, we were overly optimistic. The work of a CDC has to be a cog in a larger social-policy apparatus to revitalize an inner-city neighborhood and needs to have an economic strategy that gets people to jobs outside the neighborhood. And, not long after Kennedy’s death, the nation began a long turning away from the kinds of promising social policy initiatives he championed. He would be shocked to see how little meaningful attention we have paid—and continue to pay—to the inner city.
We have learned a lot since the Bedford-Stuyvesant CDC was created, but the vexing question of concentrated urban poverty is still with us. In the meantime, though, the realities of the inner city have worsened. Since Kennedy’s time, we have seen massive changes in the job market, the flight of higher-income people from the inner city, the conservative drift in our politics, the increase in births to unmarried mothers, crack cocaine, and the AIDS epidemic. Some of these facts are the behavioral consequences of concentrated poverty. Others reflect failures of strategy and policy in both the design and implementation of efforts that have been undertaken.
There were also issues within the CDC movement itself, which encompassed some strange bedfellows with very different motives. Some of the neighborhood people who joined to form CDCs had a political agenda of black power and community control. They were happy to accept outside resources and get outside employers to locate plants and stores in their neighborhoods, but their underlying purpose was to use those things as a means to create a self-contained economy and power base within the four corners of their immediate environs. That economy would contain its own engines, and—living together in a same-race community—the community development corporations would become a cohesive and effective force in municipal politics.
On the other hand, some of those who assisted from the outside were only too happy to do so as a strategy to mute possible demands for metropolitan desegregation. Consciously or unconsciously, some of the mayors and civic leaders and foundation heads could see a value in getting inner-city residents to stay where they were.
A centerpiece of the Bed-Stuy strategy was an IBM manufacturing plant located there by RFK’s friend Tom Watson, the company’s CEO. The ease with which IBM’s cooperation was obtained led to an assumption that others of similar magnitude would follow. They did not. Yet the notion that an economic revival could be accomplished within the borders of the neighborhood continued to hold sway.
Few revitalization initiatives responded to the reality that, in most cities, the jobs were increasingly located in the suburbs, largely inaccessible to inner-city residents in the absence of specific initiatives to get them there. Nor were the antidiscrimination laws enforced as rigorously as they should have been. These shortfalls, coupled with negative attitudes of some inner-city residents—especially men—toward white employers, diminished employment outcomes only a bus or subway ride away.
Equally troubling, few neighborhood revitalization initiatives sought to play a role in improving the education that neighborhood children were receiving. Would-be workers needed to be better educated and trained, and the local schools were falling down on the job, to say the least. One exception was the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood effort in Baltimore—started by the late James Rouse, who had given the world Columbia, Maryland; the Baltimore Harbor; and the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston—which took on responsibility for its local elementary schools in the mid-1990s.
My point here is not that Bedford-Stuyvesant was a perfect model or that CDCs and similar organizations in general were a perfect model. As applied, they tended to have the flaws I have noted, and at their best they do not represent an all-encompassing strategy. But they have a role to play. They have made important contributions especially in the areas of housing and economic development and will properly be a part of ongoing efforts. What those efforts should look like is the subject of the rest of this chapter.
The triple whammy of a national economy unwelcoming of people with incomes below the national median, the consequent intensification of inner-city poverty, and the weak public policy responses to both problems meant that neighborhood-revitalization efforts also operated against great odds after 1968. The general waning of interest in problems of the inner city once the civil unrest of the 1960s had been contained added to the difficulty of getting things done.
Not that the inner city was off the table completely. As we have noted, its residents became the stuff of racial politics—both Reagan’s “welfare queen” and the first Bush’s Willie Horton.
Why the Democrats had no effective response is not easy to answer. One way to answer is to ask what would have happened if Robert Kennedy had lived since he was so especially interested in the inner city (regardless of whether he would have been elected president). Kennedy (and, in a more traditionally liberal way, Hubert Humphrey) represented the urban and minority base of the Democratic Party, although RFK appealed to other constituencies as well. George McGovern, despite his wonderful work on hunger, was more attuned to a suburban, environmental, dovish, and highly process-oriented constituency. Beginning with Kennedy’s death and Humphrey’s decline, the party turned away from its urban roots. Maybe this was just an artifact of demographics, with the balance of power relocating to the suburbs and the Sunbelt, but perhaps different national leadership in the party would have paid positive attention to the problems in the inner city and not left those issues to be exploited by the political operatives of the right. And maybe Robert Kennedy was one of a kind.
There was constant neighborhood-revitalization activity all over the country all through the 1970s and 1980s. There was the Watts Labor Community Action Committee in Los Angeles, the New Community Corporation in Newark, the Woodlawn Organization and later the Steans Foundation in Chicago, the work of James Rouse in Baltimore and of Price Charities in San Diego, and many others in many cities. They were making a difference then and they still are today.
In the late 1980s, Jack Kemp reintroduced the issue to national policy. The former quarterback, conservative to the core in believing tax cuts would solve every American problem, had a distinctly iconoclastic view among Republicans about the politics of race and about race itself. Invoking the memory of Robert Kennedy and Bedford-Stuyvesant, as well as experience in Great Britain under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Kemp applied his tax-cutting faith to the inner city and proposed a scheme called enterprise zones, a British term. Kennedy—as we know, not a traditional liberal—had indeed introduced legislation to offer tax incentives to stimulate plant location in inner cities (and a companion bill that targeted rural areas). Kemp’s idea was in the same vein, except that Kennedy’s idea was part of a comprehensive strategy, quite different from a pure supply-side approach. Thinking that tax incentives would do the job in and of themselves was not a sound idea, but at least it was an idea. Quite a few localities and a few states tried using tax incentives to stimulate housing and economic development in blighted neighborhoods but, usually lacking a three-dimensional approach, did not accomplish much.
Bill Clinton’s election produced another chapter in the story—Empowerment Zones. Recruited to the president’s economic team was a Michigan lawyer and law professor named Paul Dimond who had a career-long interest in inner-city revitalization. Dimond, who was nothing if not single-minded, thought enterprise zones (in the sense of tax incentives) could work if they were coupled with direct federal funding and a requirement for a collaborative local planning process. Dimond talked to everybody whose ear he could bend, and the result was that the White House sent his idea to Capitol Hill.
Senator Bill Bradley and Congressman Charles Rangel picked up the idea, and it was enacted in May 1993. What happened was a modest example of why people say passing bills is like making sausage. Then, as now, there wasn’t a lot of money available, but there were a lot of members of Congress who wanted a piece of the action. What was created sounded big—a billion-dollar investment that would make funding available to 104 urban and rural communities, over and above the value of the various tax incentives created by the legislation. The smaller print clarified that the billion was over a ten-year period, although—unlike many other programs—the appropriation would be made all at once so that it wouldn’t be subject to the annual vicissitudes of the congressional budgeting process. And while there were indeed to be 104 recipient communities, only nine amounted to anything. The nine (six urban and three rural) would be called empowerment zones (EZs). The urban zones would receive $100 million each, and the rural zones would each get $30 million. Each of the ninety-five other communities, called enterprise communities (ECs), would receive just under $2.9 million. Even the bigger urban-zone money was actually a pittance, apart from the tax incentives—$10 million a year when you broke it down—and the law required that it be divided among three neighborhoods in each city.8
We might have thought we had learned from history. The Model Cities program in the 1960s, a federal initiative to use holistic approaches against poverty in low-income neighborhoods, had also suffered from having its funding spread too thin. By the time Congress had finished with Model Cities, it had diluted the money so as to spread it to nearly two hundred communities. Then, during the Nixon years, the ever-present appetite of state and local officials for federal money without strings and performance measures carried the day, and Model Cities became Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs). Clearly, some of the CDBG funds over the years have helped low-income neighborhoods, but it is impossible to know how much because cities are permitted to use the funds in so many different ways, and tracking is inadequate to say the least. On the other hand, if Model Cities had been targeted to the thirty highest-priority cities, it might have lacked the political support to be enacted in the first place.
Bradley and Rangel did one other thing. They structured the legislation to make it a part of Title XX of the Social Security Act, which brought me into it. Why? Because, as part of Title XX, the money would be appropriated to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where I was working, instead of directly to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture, which were tasked with giving out the money. Bradley and Rangel used Title XX because it was under their jurisdiction as members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.
Donna Shalala, my boss at HHS, is an urbanist by training. She told the White House that she could not be statutorily responsible for the funds without having a say in how they would be spent and put me in charge of HHS’s participation. A five-way steering committee was created, with representatives of the White House, the vice president’s office (Vice President Al Gore had been tapped by President Clinton to oversee the program), and the three departments.
Understanding that the statute wasn’t written the way we would have written it and that the funding was less than it should have been, we dove in. We wrote a request for proposals that we thought was quite good, requiring a collaborative and participatory planning process that created local structures that had a lasting salutary effect in some areas—even in some places that didn’t get funded. We required a showing of what state and local funds would be put into the implementation, and in some cities the response was impressive—$200 million in New York, for example ($100 million from the state and $100 million from the city).
The program had some good outcomes, particularly in New York City and Philadelphia. My niece, Deborah Wright, was in charge of the Harlem portion of the effort in New York and produced some quite tangible outcomes in housing and economic development. I asked Debbie what the three top accomplishments of the New York EZ were during her four years at the helm, from 1996 to 1999. She listed developing a comprehensive business plan to create jobs by investing in industries already thriving in New York City but not in Harlem (tourism, business services, and education); catalytic investment in Harlem USA, the first meaningful retail development in decades, anchored by a Magic Johnson Theatre; and creation of a $25 million investment pool specifically targeting cultural institutions.
Debbie thinks the work was at a significant enough scale that there was some synergism in its neighborhood effects, particularly because of the added infusion of money from the state and the city. There was certainly quite a bit of gentrification in Harlem bringing some of the change but, especially because there is so much public housing there, the neighborhood still has a large number of low-income people. The commercial investments were helped by the middle-income influx, but the lower-income people definitely benefited as well. The Pathmark supermarket that opened brought nationally competitive prices to the area, as did other new ventures, and the Pathmark store became the most profitable in the whole chain. The stores in Harlem USA, as well as Pathmark and others that came along, hired a substantial number of young workers who would be out of luck in other inner cities. The quality of community life improved across the board. These kinds of interactive results are exactly what we want to see from neighborhood revitalization initiatives. Obviously the Empowerment Zone didn’t make good things happen all by itself, but it helped significantly.
Philadelphia mayor (later Pennsylvania governor) Ed Rendell pursued a combined economic development and social services strategy in three Philadelphia neighborhoods. The EZ made 223 loans to 139 businesses, attracted 460 new businesses, leveraged more than $100 million in private investment, and created two-thousand-plus jobs for EZ residents. The urban landscape initiative built five community service facilities, including the Althea Gibson Community Education and Tennis Center, and hauled away twenty-two tons of trash. The EZ’s twelve housing initiatives rehabilitated 304 homes.
On the other hand, Bill Campbell, the mayor of Atlanta who later went to jail for tax evasion, squandered the money without any visible outcome, and Chicago mayor Richard Daley distributed the funds in a highly politicized way for which there was little to show at the end of the day.
Perhaps the empowerment zone program would have matured into an interesting effort if it had been permitted to develop further; what happened in Harlem is one indication. But the Gingrich revolution wasn’t supportive of the empowerment zones. There was a second, more modest round of funding in 1998 that added some additional empowerment zone designations and a third in 2001 that awarded only eligibility for tax incentives. The last round of tax incentives was meant to expire in 2009 but was extended until the end of 2011 as an antirecessionary measure. President Clinton was able to get other economic development tax incentives enacted late in his second term, but, not surprisingly, the George W. Bush era saw little new activity in this area.
What would make a difference? A hot economy would. In every respect, a strong economy is our strongest antipoverty weapon, even when it helps the rich more than the poor. When there’s a hot economy, there are more jobs and all of the jobs pay a little better. We had a hot economy in the second half of the 1990s. It did have a positive impact on life in the inner cities. Unemployment went down and income from work went up. The big increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit that had been added by legislation in 1986, 1990, and 1993 bumped up the incentive for single mothers to work and added income to those who already had a low-wage job.
A neighborhood that has more people working is going to be a healthier neighborhood. We saw some evidence of that in the late 1990s. There will still be problems—lousy schools, environmental justice issues like lead poisoning and toxic dumps, and crime rates higher than those in the rest of the city. But two things that the brief economic sunshine of the late 1990s told us are (1) if there is a better income mix, there will be a better neighborhood; and (2) trends concerning poverty aren’t always bad and getting worse, even on seemingly intractable fronts. Poverty rates plunged in the late 1990s, and people who had been denigrated and stereotyped proved that they were quite willing and able to work. Things can improve.
There are two ways to achieve a better income mix in a neighborhood. One is more work and better pay for the people already there. The other is to get people with higher incomes to move in. This one is only applicable in generally healthy cities with a central core identity and, in any event, it has risks. Who is moving in? Are they people who want to be part of the community that was already there? That’s good. Or are they people who would prefer that those already there disappear? In other words, gentrification gone bad. The hot economy had a downside that continued through the housing bubble: gentrification that in too many instances pushed poor people out.
Nonetheless, there is some new thinking about remedies for concentrated urban poverty and, despite the challenges posed by gentrification, the new thinking has begun to affect public policy and civic action. Fueled by federal funding to deconcentrate public housing, a new generation of developers has produced mixed-income housing in some low-income neighborhoods. The Harlem Children’s Zone and other school ventures have offered new educational initiatives that combine excellent schools with services addressing the problems associated with the ubiquitous poverty of the children they serve. Finally, there are some new schemes to help inner-city residents get and keep jobs in the regional economy.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the significant impact—largely negative for the poor, I would argue—that gentrification has had. Bad or good, in some cities it is the biggest change in residential patterns since suburbanization and exurbanization. With major exceptions such as Detroit and Phoenix (for quite different reasons), people have rediscovered the central city as an attractive place to live. Young singles and couples, especially before their children are of school age, and baby boomers with empty nests have voted with their feet (at least until the recession set in) to settle in or return to central-city locations.
This is desirable in many ways. Mayors love the increase in their tax bases and residents who don’t have a disproportionate need for municipal services. A vibrant central city is great for business, especially the entertainment business. A sense of life and energy is great all around. But things get more complicated when the neighborhoods moved to are predominantly poor, which has happened in many cities. Radical change has occurred almost overnight in low-income neighborhoods that are easily accessible to downtown, have a sound housing stock, and are adjacent to higher-income areas. Too often, the existing residents find themselves pushed out by skyrocketing rents and property taxes.
Some older residents have chosen, quite happily (before housing prices plummeted), to sell their homes and go back to the South. Too many others, though, have dispersed in directions unknown and all too often to circumstances less desirable than where they previously were. To the extent that those pushed out (and new immigrants as well) end up in inner-ring suburbs, new challenges posed by concentrated poverty show up in places even less equipped to respond with transit and other necessary services and community-development strategies. Some cities have adopted circuit-breakers that slow the pace of property tax increases on lower-income homeowners to help them stay where they are, but in general it is difficult to stem the tide of the market, wholly apart from whether there is any political will to do so.
Overall, gentrification is not an unalloyed good or bad, but rather an urban reality that policy makers have a responsibility to manage in order to minimize displacement and preserve social fabrics. In some cities, it has changed the playing field regarding concentrated poverty, at least in neighborhoods that are attractive to higher-income people.
What is the strategic point here? My view has always been that our society functions best when no one is consigned by law or a multiplicity of facts and forces to live in a certain part of a city. The ideas in this chapter are premised on the idea of real choice. This means policies that directly promote deconcentration in a metropolitan framework and policies to strengthen inner-city neighborhoods both to empower people to move if they want to and to build a stronger community for those who prefer to stay where they are.
If gentrification is one trend changing the face of concentrated poverty, another is the demolition of inner-city public housing and the accompanying dispersal of its residents. This has occurred under HOPE VI, the Homeownership and Opportunities for People Everywhere Act, enacted in 1992. The original idea behind HOPE VI was to weed out unsatisfactory public housing and replace it with mixed-income developments without reducing the supply of housing for low-income people. But the fact is that HOPE VI has significantly dented the national inventory of public housing and forcibly relocated tenants in large numbers (although it hasn’t had much effect on the overall level of inner-city poverty in most localities).9
The numbers are quite large, and the effect on the public-housing inventory is significant. HUD has made about 250 HOPE VI public-housing revitalization grants, which eventuated in the demolition of almost a hundred thousand public housing units and the relocation of seventy-thousand-plus households. Around 111,000 new and rehabilitated units were developed, including 53,000 units of public housing. In all, the total public-housing stock has decreased by about 12 percent from the 1.33 million units available in 1995.10 That’s a lot. Yet it’s important to remember that the number of families who were relocated is only a tiny fraction of the inner-city poor.
So how should we think about HOPE VI? Opinions are divided, even among liberals.
On the one hand, Bruce Katz, a former senior HUD official and highly respected housing and urban policy expert, says, “HOPE VI is one of the most successful urban redevelopment initiatives of the past half-century.”11 On the other hand, Sheila Crowley, the president and CEO of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, calls it “a case study in how badly a national program can run amok.” 12
Crowley and others point out that the country lost 12 percent of its public-housing inventory at a time when the supply of affordable housing was steadily shrinking and urban rents were going through the roof. Many low-income people were moved whether they wanted to be or not. And the demolished housing was replaced by mixed-income developments with far fewer units for low-income people than the projects they replaced. In some instances, HOPE VI amounted to a federally subsidized land grab for developers and gentrifiers.
By contrast, HOPE VI’s adherents stress the awfulness of the projects that were demolished, Cabrini-Green in Chicago being a prime example. They also cite examples of mixed-income developments that are not only successful, but in some cases have brought about decreases in the poverty rate in their surrounding neighborhoods. Chicago public-interest lawyer Alexander Polikoff lists examples from Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and San Francisco where neighborhoods in which a HOPE VI development was situated experienced subsequent decreases in poverty of 10 percent or more.
The core of the difference between the contending sides is a fierce argument between those who see HOPE VI as destroying communities—however troubled they may be—and reducing the inventory of badly needed public housing and those who see it as helping people escape the ravages of concentrated poverty. The critics of HOPE VI see the involuntary relocation of people as no different from the much-maligned urban-renewal policies of half a century ago. Supporters see the relocation efforts as pathways to a better life and avenues toward racial and economic desegregation as well. They stress that most of the previous residents do not want to return to the neighborhood and are glad to have the housing vouchers that enable them (although not always without difficulty) to move to a neighborhood they find more desirable.
Who is right? Much of the public housing that was torn down was inherently unlivable or had become so. But, at least in hindsight, it does appear that a larger investment in support services would have helped people find more suitable housing and adjust more satisfactorily to their new surroundings. My heart is with deconcentration. We know there are problems both ways. At the very least, deconcentrating at scale is a tall order. But I believe we have a better chance of breaking the cycle of concentration effects relatively more quickly with dispersion strategies. Especially with inner-city neighborhoods that are not close to downtown areas, I think the possibility of attracting in-migration is slim. And while I put somewhat more hope in improving educational and employment outcomes for current inner-city residents, I think breaking through the consequences of concentration is very hard.
But we should not make hasty judgments. It may take a generation or more to see the real outcomes of HOPE VI. I still think that, done right, it is the preferable road to take, although neighborhood-based strategies must go on as well.
Going back to Robert Kennedy, the “gold standard” for dealing with high-poverty neighborhoods has for decades been the idea of tackling the problems holistically. The insight of Bedford-Stuyvesant and others of the time was that the issues couldn’t be confronted one by one, because everything affects everything. The problem was, having one organization try to do everything proved to be nearly impossible. The need to tap totally different areas of expertise, different funding streams, and different bureaucratic frameworks—just to mention a few—posed enormous barriers.
So the CDCs and other multi-dimensional entities tended to focus on economic development and housing, and sometimes health care and early child development, but stayed away from things like education. Governance and management of school systems tended to be located downtown and difficult to penetrate. Community control was tried here and there, most notably in New York City, but didn’t stick. There were a few alternative schools in inner cities, but funding was hard to come by, and they mostly didn’t survive.
Geoffrey Canada has embodied the idea of using education as an anchor for broader activities to help children and families—including early child development, parenting classes for new parents, and after-school enrichment. The Harlem Children’s Zone, which Canada founded, came to be a multi-dimensional children’s initiative through years of trial and error. Early on, his work was mainly focused on the off-school hours—using school buildings for after-school activities as part of New York City’s Beacon Schools program, which opened schools throughout the city to nonprofit organizations.
As that effort progressed, Canada realized that there could be resonance in expanding the scale of the work to more parts of Harlem and to a broader age range, including dual-generation programs that would reach young parents and their children simultaneously. The final insight was that everything he was doing would be for naught if the schools the children attended were failing to teach them satisfactorily. For young people, the way out of the inner city is a good education that leads them to college or into the labor market.
The heart of the Harlem Children’s Zone is the organization’s charter schools. A recent evaluation praises the multi-dimensional design of the Zone’s work but concludes that the key to lasting success is the schools. It may seem obvious, but it has taken a long time for people working on inner-city neighborhood revitalization to get the point that good schools have to be a cornerstone element of the strategy.
Why did it happen now? One reason is the advent of charter schools, which have made it possible to establish significant numbers of independent public schools in low-income neighborhoods. Before that, the public schools were in most places part of monolithic citywide systems that were virtually impervious to change implemented from the ground up. It is hard to see how the Zone could have been designed with schools as its central focus without the possibility of creating charter schools. Nonetheless, it should be said that, impelled by the competition of charter schools or not, public school systems have in recent years become more amenable to arrangements that reflect a greater commitment to parent- and community-sensitive values. Nor are charter schools a panacea. The work is to make all public schools exemplars of excellence. There are many problems with charter schools, but properly overseen, they should be part of a public-education reform strategy. For the Harlem Children’s Zone, charter schools were a key building block.
The Harlem Children’s Zone is not the only education-focused inner-city initiative. I mentioned Sandtown in Baltimore a little earlier. Here I am talking about the traditional public schools. I was impressed with the emphasis on the schools when I visited there in the late 1990s. I was fortunate in writing this book to have a chance to visit with Tina Hike-Hubbard, who has been working on education in the neighborhood since 1997 and is now the education director of Enterprise Community Partners and a member of the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners. Hike-Hubbard was able to tell me how things have evolved based on her direct experience.
The Sandtown initiative itself—as a full-throttle effort to tackle all facets of life in Sandtown—no longer exists. Enterprise, James Rouse’s organization, is best at doing affordable housing and associated community development. Community Building in Partnership, the nonprofit it created to drive the neighborhood improvement strategy, never took hold as a community institution and went out of business in 2008. Perhaps in part as a legacy to CBP’s contribution, there are other vibrant actors in the community, especially New Song Church.
Enterprise has stayed energetically involved in housing and education. Its housing work has been quite successful. The economic status of the neighborhood as a whole hasn’t changed much, but the housing that Enterprise and others have built or rehabilitated is stable. The purchasers and renters have stayed, and the foreclosure rate through the recession is very low. Enterprise built six hundred homes in the early 1990s. Those homes that were for sale sold for $58,500, with a $39,000 first mortgage. This was what has come to be called workforce housing—one had to have a job to get a mortgage. Buyers had incomes of $30,000 to $40,000 and were mainly people from the neighborhood who wanted to stay there. Only 15 percent have been sold to others over the past two decades. Over the years, the owners have finished the basements in the homes and made attractive improvements in the front and back yards. The blocks where they live are stable and livable. The people are where they want to be. It’s a good story. The neighborhood isn’t transformed, but it’s much better for some of its residents.
The housing work is very important, but the education work is even more interesting because of the fact that it was truly path-breaking when it started. And the fact that Tina Hike-Hubbard is now on the city’s school board says a lot.
The story over the past dozen years is not only about the schools themselves but also about some ancillary activities that are very important. When I visited in 1999, the work was only in the elementary schools. Sylvia Peters, the charismatic woman who was then Tina Hike-Hubbard’s boss, was frustrated that she and her colleagues couldn’t crack the nearby middle school, where the gains they had made in the elementary schools were being destroyed.
Over the years, the local school became a K–8 school, so the Enterprise people were able to stay involved with the neighborhood schools through eighth grade. (Middle schools are being phased out citywide now.) As I write, Baltimore has a widely admired superintendent, Andres Alonso, so the citywide prospects are pretty good. Nonetheless, Hike-Hubbard says, the ups and downs of Pinderhughes, the middle school, have had more to do with facts on the ground in the building itself, especially the different principals who have been there. When I talked to her, she said there is another transition under way and “we have to make it work.”
Having a well-connected person who works for a well-connected organization taking a special interest in a public school that serves low-income children is a good story in itself, but there is more to tell.
For one thing, Enterprise has a HIPPY home visiting program. HIPPY stands for Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters. Founded in Israel, it was first brought to the United States by then-governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton. In Sandtown, Enterprise has a hundred families of three- to five-year-olds involved. Parents and grandparents do the visiting and bring twenty-seven books for parents to read to their children. They teach parents about lead safety, nutrition, and really any subject a parent asks about. Forty percent of the parents are in their teens, but some are as old as forty. One hundred percent of the children are passing state school readiness tests, a signal achievement.
Second, there is a community resource center located at the school. There are now nineteen such centers around the city, with a full-time staff person in each school. The staff person sees to getting glasses for kids, helping parents with jobs and job training and getting into GED programs, and arranging parent workshops.
Third, there is the Enterprise Women’s Network that mentors girls in grades three through eight, ages seven through fourteen. They do field trips and educational workshops and travel outside the city to see green spaces. There are forty women involved—a very diverse group, young and old, black and white.
The City Heights Initiative in San Diego is another case where education became a major focus. Begun in 1994, Price Charities’ work there was initially concerned with basic infrastructure and commercial development. The initiative started with construction: a shopping center and a community-friendly police substation that included a recreation center open to the public. The area had previously become a food desert with the closing of a local Safeway. The shopping center brought a new grocery store and a number of other stores selling at nationally competitive prices. The development efforts went on to include housing, an office center, a community health center, a library, three elementary schools, and a continuing-education facility—all situated to reinforce a sense of community. The police station and the shopping center are across the street from each other. Public drug use and public prostitution have disappeared.
The second phase was focused on partnering with nonprofits. The six-story office center that Price Charities built to house its own work became the locus for health care and social services. The La Maestra Clinic, a key health provider in the community, moved from a little house to a new facility financed by Price Charities and other partners. Tad Parzen, the executive vice president of Price Charities whose office is located in City Heights, says the clinic is exactly the same as the pediatric clinic his daughter goes to except that it lacks the flat-screen television and the tropical fish.
Price Charities’ role has evolved from mainly being a funder into serving as an advocate, catalyst, deal maker, and convener, as well as a funder. Current projects are a new four-story all-purpose building that will have a Walgreens, a restaurant, and housing. More schools are on the way, too. Price hasn’t financed all of these projects by itself. There are numerous other funders, both public and private, but Price’s leadership and leveraged investment have been vital.
All along the way there has been a strong focus on education. Education was a priority from the beginning in terms of physical development, but there is now a central emphasis on human-capital improvement too. In short, education is now a principal target. When they started working in City Heights, the schools were so bad that children were being sent by their parents to other schools around the city. Now there are eleven schools within one square mile. Price Charities is involved in academic enhancement, school-based health, and social work. Ninety percent of their activity now is in the schools, although strategically, Parzen says, they view the work not as narrowly education-related but as community-building.
Parzen says his biggest frustration is that they still have not been successful in getting people to stay in the neighborhood when their economic situation improves. For one thing, the community is still not safe at night, and in 2010 there were three murders in broad daylight near one of the schools. Public safety continues to be a challenge.
I would add one friendly amendment to the three education stories. We need to pursue racial desegregation wherever we can. This is not a legal point. Few discoverable instances of intentional segregation are still extant. Even the possibility of voluntary plans has been substantially truncated by the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision regarding such plans in Seattle and Louisville. In addition, geography is the enemy in many places. That said, especially in medium-size cities, charters and magnets can produce at least modest oases of desegregation. We should pursue them wherever we can.
The Harlem Children’s Zone, Sandtown, and City Heights stories are illustrative of multifaceted, community-based initiatives that focus on education as a key part of an attack on concentrated poverty. Not enough of the others are involved with education, but all such initiatives share a local combination of civic and philanthropic leadership and funding from an array of private and public sources. Finally creating a federal initiative that would provide serious resources to attack concentrated poverty remains an unfulfilled and perhaps unrealistic hope. In the meantime, the kind of local leadership that created the models we have is always a precious commodity to be greatly appreciated.
In the mid-1990s, the Annie E. Casey Foundation began a program focused on getting inner-city residents hired for jobs throughout the regional economies of local areas. The endeavor began with six sites: Denver, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Seattle, although New Orleans fell by the wayside fairly quickly. It has proliferated to include some two hundred foundations that, along with public funds, support twenty-one sites around the country, all part of what is now called the National Fund for Workforce Solutions. In general, the local efforts are sector-specific partnerships that involve employers and unions in such areas as health care, technology, and construction. The partnerships include entities that do the necessary training and community-based organizations that identify prospects and offer mentoring and support during training, placement, and employment. They have made a difference, but, as in so many areas, the gains are measured more in the number of people who are doing better than in observable changes in the overall employment and poverty statistics. And much of the work is in jeopardy in the current wave of cutting public budgets.
The Casey program and the ensuing National Fund for Workforce Solutions are representative of an approach that deserves more public funding to enable wide replication: to give residents of the inner city a serious opportunity to be trained for, find, and hold on to jobs in the regional economy. There are community values in inner-city neighborhoods, at least among those with residents who have long-standing ties to the neighborhood. Better schooling in inner-city neighborhoods, combined with accessibility to jobs around the metropolitan area, offers the potential for transformative outcomes in those neighborhoods.
Researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and, most important, residents are still arguing vociferously over the right direction for inner-city policy. Nonetheless, there is an emerging view among a considerable number (including me) that the best approach is a pragmatic and holistic one: inner-city revitalization is important, but it must be an integrated part of a larger regional development strategy. Our goal should be to make it possible for people to live wherever they want in the metropolitan area and find jobs throughout the region, while also improving the livability of the neighborhoods where they live now. The key idea is that people should have real choices, and creating real choices means pursuing multiple policies and strategies simultaneously. This is the strategic frame. Moving forward is necessarily a long-term project.
Choice is controversial in more ways than one. To create residential choice throughout the region requires a new intensity in enforcing laws that prohibit all forms of relevant discrimination. Minorities moving to the suburbs still find themselves steered to same-race or same-ethnicity neighborhoods. Realtors, subtly or not, suggest that people looking for a new home will be most comfortable with people of their own race or ethnicity or class. Discrimination in the credit market is rampant, with creditworthy minorities still pushed regularly into subprime loans. And minorities encounter school districts’ line-drawing policies in the suburbs that result in same-race and same-ethnicity schools.
Concerns of a different kind attend the question of making it possible for people to remain where they are in the inner city. These are likely to remain same-race neighborhoods. I do not believe in perpetuating racial segregation, even if it is technically not state-mandated segregation. Our priority should be policies that promote desegregation throughout metropolitan areas. But if strong steps are taken to help people improve their personal economic situation and the neighborhood around them as well, that will empower them to have the wherewithal to move out if they want to; if they stay in what turns into a healthier neighborhood, that will be their choice.
If people are to have choice about where they reside—in addition to the need for much more robust enforcement of antidiscrimination laws—there needs to be a ramped-up housing-supply policy in the realms of both public and affordable housing. It also means an increased investment in federally financed housing-choice vouchers that subsidize rents and let people choose where they will live, enriched with social services so people can use them effectively in the suburbs as well as in the city.
There is serious debate over the efficacy of policies to deconcentrate inner-city poverty. Studies of past efforts have shown mixed results. Nevertheless, central-city minorities have for decades been finding their way to what are now mixed-race and mixed-ethnicity inner-ring suburbs, sometimes with government help pursuant to litigation to desegregate public housing and sometimes with funding from a program created by Congress. The results are far from perfect, partly because of the policy failures mentioned above. But it makes sense that lower-income people can also succeed and provide better lives for their children in new surroundings if we take the measures necessary to encourage, subsidize, and otherwise facilitate their choices. What is needed is strategic thinking about a broader approach to housing choice throughout metropolitan regions.
The other side of the coin is the constellation of issues relating to those who would choose to remain in the inner city. I see six areas of action here. Operationally, these ideas have two strategic purposes: to build a stronger platform for those who would like to move out but don’t currently have the capacity to do so and to strengthen the community for those whose choice it is to stay in the inner city.
One key aim has to be a strategy of pursuing a living income for everyone, derived as much as possible from work. This is a remedy that applies across the board, but it has a special resonance for those who want to stay in the inner city. Raising their incomes will make a major difference in the quality of life in the neighborhood. Policies such as the minimum wage, health coverage, affordable child care, excellent public education, help with the cost of housing and college, and a decent safety net are important for the whole society, but they have a particular relevance to breaking the back of concentrated poverty.
A second element is to do everything possible to help inner-city residents get and keep jobs in the regional economy. This means developing sector-specific partnerships among employers, schools, colleges, and community-based organizations to prepare people of all ages for good jobs that are projected to be most available in the coming years (and this is of course a challenge to the education community generally). It also means special attention to transportation, whether by mass transit or car, to enable inner-city residents to commute to their jobs wherever they are located. Of course, all of this can be done well or badly. Employers can distort job-training programs for their own narrow purposes, and proprietary trade schools can misuse public funds. Proper oversight has to be part of the equation.
Middle-skilled jobs offer promise in coming years and, as baby boomers retire, so does the possibility that green jobs will come to be a realistic source of work. If these opportunities are to reach everyone, specific mechanisms need to be in place to make that happen. The pathways should have initial on-ramps in high schools and community colleges—and also through nonprofit organizations like YouthBuild—that reach young people who are already disconnected from school and work and offer the education, training, and personal development support they need to get into the job market or pursue further education.
The third key is livable neighborhoods. Streets should be well-lit, parks and playgrounds conveniently located and attractive, and law enforcement effective and fair. The retail stores, cinemas, parks, playgrounds, and other amenities that people in every other neighborhood have should be available to people in low-income neighborhoods. The obvious synergistic point is that residents have to have the income necessary to support businesses located in the neighborhood. Quality health and child care facilities need to be accessible, too.
A fourth is that neighborhood schools should be of high quality and that school quality should be a part of an overall urban and antipoverty strategy, rather than siloed off by itself. School systems and educational innovators should make inner cities a preferential site for the establishment of innovative and high-quality schools, with charter schools being a useful part of a strategy for improving educational opportunities for children in high-poverty neighborhoods—desegregated racially wherever possible. Locating magnet schools in or near low-income neighborhoods is one strategy to attract a mix of income and racial backgrounds to the benefit of all. Improving schools and improving neighborhoods go hand in hand.
President Obama pledged in his campaign to take the Harlem Children’s Zone nationwide with an initiative he calls Promise Neighborhoods. To that end, funding for twenty planning grants was appropriated during the first full year of his administration, followed by a modest expansion for a second year of operation. The number of applications for the planning grants was impressive but the pace of expansion has collided with the current political situation.
Nonetheless, Promise Neighborhoods represents an understanding, too long in coming, that any strategy to address concentrated poverty from a place-based perspective must have an emphasis on the education of the neighborhood’s children. At the same time, it is important to understand that the Promise Neighborhoods idea offers new departures in only a limited number of places. An overall strategy to improve education for all low-income children, especially those in low-income neighborhoods, is the approach with much greater potential for broad-scale change.
Fifth, very important but not without risk to current residents who wish to remain in their neighborhoods, are efforts to attract higher-income people. Gentrification should be promoted, albeit carefully, and not impeded. Attracting people to the neighborhood who support its preservation as a mixed-income community would raise the median income of the area and, ultimately, lift the quality of life of everyone living there. But anti-displacement policies are essential. Tenants should have rights of first refusal to buy apartment buildings that landlords or developers want to convert to condominiums. Homeowners should be given circuit-breaker property tax relief so they aren’t forced to sell due to unaffordable property taxes. Inclusionary zoning requiring developers to create new multiple dwellings and to make a reasonable fraction available on an affordable basis can be helpful. Public funds that invest in projects to develop and rehabilitate affordable housing must use their resources strategically to see that a fair share of the work occurs in inner-city neighborhoods, especially where the investment will contribute to enhancing the income mix in the area.
For more isolated neighborhoods with persistent and intergenerational poverty, it will be more difficult to attract new residents with higher incomes. But even in these neighborhoods, middle-income people could be enticed in better economic times by lower prices on attractive new housing. Of course, the neighborhood also has to be safe, have good schools, and offer parks and recreation and other amenities.
Sixth and finally, explicit attention to the behavioral patterns—denigration of the value of education, crime, nonmarital childbearing, and more—that have been associated with concentrated poverty is essential. Sad to say, they have become embedded and, in effect, intergenerational. The structural frameworks and continuing racism and racial discrimination have to be addressed, but so do the issues of personal and parental responsibility. Much of what is needed has to happen on the ground, in the community, carried out as a matter of civic action.
The essential premise for federal policy on concentrated urban poverty is that the necessary change must be comprehensive, with presidential leadership and, as necessary, legislation to involve every department and agency with responsibility for some relevant aspect of the task. The same is true for state and local government. The ostensibly overarching strategies of the past essentially let key players off the hook. This was true of Lyndon Johnson’s Model Cities and Bill Clinton’s Empowerment Zones. The task needs to be broken down into parts but connected to achieve the maximum collective impact. No one program can do everything that has to be done.
The education people have to pay attention to making the schools work—including co-location of and connection to health care facilities, child care, afterschool programs, and other social services. Transit agencies need to design the next generation of systems not just for suburban commuters entering the city but also for city residents headed for the suburbs. Housing policy needs to be regional and neighborhood-based. Energy policy needs to build “smart grids” and promote green jobs in the inner city and elsewhere. Environmental protection doesn’t stop at the inner-city neighborhood line. Federal policy and funding will be needed to leverage much of what needs to be done.
We need to act on what we have learned about concentrated poverty. Bedford-Stuyvesant and other neighborhood revitalization initiatives were based on the premise that a poor area can be fixed by efforts within their borders, albeit with outside funding. There is no such thing as a neighborhood revitalization policy that can occur in isolation. For the twenty-first century, we must attack urban concentrated poverty with strategies that are regional in scope, as well as beneficial to people where they live now. Robert Kennedy had it right in the broad strokes if not in the exact details in his trilogy of speeches in 1966. Closing the last of the speeches, he said, “We are only at the beginning of the beginning in thinking about opportunities for all.”13 We know much more about the details now. No one in this nation should be part of any group that someone can rightly call “The Abandoned.”