Homewood may be Pittsburgh’s poorest and most neglected neighborhood. In contrast to the Hill District, immortalized in August Wilson’s masterful cycle of plays, which sits prominently between downtown Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh, Homewood lies in an isolated part of the city’s East End well off the beaten track. As Homewood’s city councilman, the Reverend Ricky Burgess, wrote in a 2015 op-ed, “Homewood is the city’s poorest, least-diverse, most dangerous neighborhood, with the highest amount of violence and economic distress. Homewood also has the city’s largest number of vacant, abandoned, and tax-delinquent properties. There are no grocery stores, no drugstores, no clothing stores, and no name-brand store of any kind. The terror of drugs, crime, and gun violence causes fear and despair, poisoning every resident’s quality of life. It is a community in crisis.”1
The conditions Rev. Burgess is describing are not new. Nearly forty years ago, years before most of Homewood’s present residents were born, novelist John Edgar Wideman wrote about a young man in Homewood staring “into the dead storefronts.” “He peeks,” Wideman went on, “without stopping between the wooden slats where the glass used to be. Like he is reading the posters, like there might be something he needed to know…. Like he might find out why he’s twenty-five years old and never had nothing and never will….”2 Generations have grown up in Homewood, and the only thing that has changed is that each year, fewer people live there, more houses and storefronts are empty, and more of the people who do live there are poor or elderly.
What defines Homewood, though, and Baltimore’s Sandtown-Winchester, and the hundreds of similar neighborhoods in older cities across the country is not the empty houses and vacant lots, or anything about their physical environment. If that were so, there would be no good reason why they have remained as they have over the decades. We know how to fix buildings. What defines them is something different. They are neighborhoods of concentrated, persistent, intergenerational poverty.
Cities, particularly industrial cities, have always had more than their share of poor people. As economist Ed Glaeser puts it, “Cities aren’t full of poor people because cities make people poor, but because cities attract poor people with the prospect of improving their lot in life.”3 Cities have historically been places of opportunity. Most of the poor migrants who flocked to America’s older cities in earlier eras did in fact improve their lot in life. A generation later, most of the children of the people who lived in the poverty-stricken ethnic ghettos that Jacob Riis or Hutchens Hapgood wrote about were prospering. Poverty wasn’t pretty, but more often than not it was the starting point in a series of upward steps that created the mid-twentieth-century American middle class.
What has changed is not the presence of poverty, of which there is far less in the United States today than there was a hundred years ago, but the persistence of concentrated and intergenerational poverty. Poverty in any meaningful sense is not just about the people officially defined by the government as “below the poverty level,” a measure concocted in the 1960s that fails to reflect today’s reality. A single mother with two children earning $25,000 in Philadelphia today, or nearly 25 percent above the official 2017 poverty level, will spend half of her gross income to afford the median-priced two-bedroom apartment in that city. If we treat one and a half times the official poverty level as “de facto poverty,” we find that over one-third of the residents of relatively successful legacy cities like Philadelphia and St. Louis are poor, as are half or more of the residents of more struggling cities like Detroit or Cleveland. They are disproportionately likely to live in areas of concentrated poverty, where their poverty is transmitted from generation to generation almost as predictably as the transmission of inherited genetic traits. Being poor in an American city is no longer a stepping stone to upward mobility. It is a trap from which few escape.
That trap, the sheer number of people caught in it, and its persistence and growth over time, is the flip side of the reviving American city. Unless we, as a nation and city by city, can begin to change that picture and enable more people to escape the trap, it is hard to see any alternative to our cities becoming places increasingly polarized between rich and poor. Such an outcome not only flies in the face of fairness and social justice, but if allowed to take place unchecked, may eventually undermine the revival now going on in those cities. That would be a tragedy. For American cities to revert to their hapless, seemingly hopeless, state of the 1970s will benefit no one, least of all their poor and African American communities.
Before we look at how people are trying to tackle this problem, and indeed change the picture, though, we need to ask a difficult question: why has poverty become a trap that has become so much harder to escape today?
It’s a hard question to answer, because it has too many different facets to be easily grasped. Simplistic explanations, and simplistic solutions, abound. The left-wing think tank Global Research explains intergenerational poverty in straightforward but simplistic terms: “The parent … was unable to attain a quality education, and thus was unable to find a well-paying job and wound up in poverty. The child, still living in that same area, is also suffering from not having a quality education and the results are the same: more poverty.”4 At the other end of the spectrum, the right-wing American Action Forum touts imposing work requirements on Medicaid, arguing that it “would ensure that able-bodied Medicaid recipients are investing in themselves by engaging in work activities that inherently build skills, increase labor force attachment, and place them on a path out of poverty.”5
Neither of these arguments hold water. Lack of quality education is a factor, but far from the dominant factor in either an individual’s poverty or in the transmission of intergenerational poverty. Even more questionable, and in many respects more dangerous, is the proposition that forcing people to get jobs will enable them to move out of poverty. As has been pointed out many times, most poor people work. Nearly two out of three families living in poverty include at least one worker, and some more than one. But for low-skill workers from the inner city, jobs are not a solution. They are part of the trap.
Barbara Ehrenreich writes,
I took jobs as a waitress, nursing-home aide, hotel housekeeper, Wal-Mart associate, and a maid with a house-cleaning service … the entry-level jobs most readily available to women. What I discovered is that in many ways, these jobs are a trap: They pay so little that you cannot accumulate even a couple of hundred dollars to help you make the transition to a better-paying job. They often give you no control over your work schedule, making it impossible to arrange for child care or take a second job. And in many of these jobs, even young women soon begin to experience the physical deterioration—especially knee and back problems—that can bring a painful end to their work life.6
The average wage of a housekeeper at a hotel or nursing home, or a home health aide, a fast-food cook at McDonalds, or a retail clerk at a Walmart or one of their competitors is about $10 per hour, or about $20,000 per year if you work at least forty hours a week, every week, year-round. Twenty thousand dollars is roughly the poverty level for a family of three, or a single mother with two children. But most poor people don’t work full-time, or year-round. In Cleveland, more than one out of three working people earned less than $15,000 in 2014. The median earnings for all Cleveland workers, poor and non-poor, was just under $23,000 per year. In cities like Cleveland, the well-paying factory jobs of fifty years ago, which offered people with little formal education a step up into the middle class, have long since disappeared.
The barriers to escaping poverty through work for residents of urban concentrated-poverty areas go well beyond the miserable wages that are offered by most jobs that people without much formal education or specialized skills can get. Jobs are usually far from people’s homes, and public transportation is inadequate, if it exists at all. Without a reliable car, which few poor people can afford, people are locked into the few jobs that are close enough to public transportation, assuming they’re physically able to walk to the nearest transit stop.
For a resident of Cleveland’s Central neighborhood to get to the Ahuja Medical Center, a major employer in close-in suburban Beachwood, a twenty-five-minute drive by car, it takes a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk to the nearest bus stop, two different bus rides, and another ten-minute walk to the hospital, up to an hour and a half in all if everything works right. For the same person to get to the Altenheim Senior Living facility in Strongsville, a thirty-minute drive, it will take over two hours, including over a mile of walking. It is hard to imagine any affluent commuter other than a fanatical fitness buff being willing to walk a mile to get to work, particularly in Cleveland’s frigid snowy winters.
If you can get to the job, you are likely to find that you may work irregular shifts or may be given too few hours to even minimally make ends meet, like Atlanta’s Dayisja Davis, who was working for Popeye’s. “She thought she’d be able to work and go to school if she could find good childcare,” Alana Semuels wrote in the Atlantic, “so she applied for CAPS, a Georgia childcare subsidy for low-income parents. She was denied because she would have been required to work twenty-five hours a week, but her fast-food hours were unpredictable and she sometimes didn’t get assigned enough shifts.”7 Unpredictable hours not only mean that one never knows whether one will have enough to pay the rent at the beginning of each month, but also that any activity, from a medical appointment to a parent–teacher conference, may cause lost income, or worse, a lost job.
While poverty itself is debilitating to body and spirit, decades of research since Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto have shown how much more destructive it becomes when concentrated. Areas of concentrated poverty are not neutral in their effects on family life, job opportunity, and youth behavior, but an active, malevolent force wreaking havoc in people’s lives, and undermining their efforts to forge a better life for their children. As Tom Streitz, CEO of Minneapolis’s Twin Cities RISE! puts it succinctly, “poverty rewires people.”
“Residence in a ghetto or barrio community,” Rutgers poverty scholar Paul Jargowsky writes, “makes it harder for adults to find employment and harder for children to develop the skills to succeed. The high levels of crime, low quality of public services, and social spillover effects imposes a tremendous burden on families that the federal poverty line alone cannot measure.”8 All the effects of poverty—the lack of jobs, the residential instability, the broken family structures, the health struggles, and the sheer stress of survival—are magnified and compounded.
Inner-city children are constantly moving from place to place and from school to school, going to often-inadequate schools, and subject to the constant peer pressure of the street. If they survive violence and escape incarceration, they rarely end up with either the formal education or so-called soft skills needed to continue to higher education, or to get and hold a stable, well-paying job. Debilitating diseases and health conditions, such as tuberculosis, diabetes, and obesity, are far more prevalent in concentrated-poverty areas. People in poverty are far more likely to be affected by crime and violence. As a report from Chicago’s Heartland Institute summed up, they
… experience violence committed by strangers at a rate 75 percent higher than people with high incomes, and the income disparity in the violent-crime victimization rate is even higher when the perpetrator of the crime is someone the victim knows. […] People living in poverty experience intimate-partner violence at a rate 286 percent higher than high-income people, while they experience crime committed by other family members at a rate 278 percent higher than people with high incomes and crime committed by friends/acquaintances at a rate 149 percent higher than people with high incomes.9
One can argue about why inner-city areas are so dangerous, but the reality is indisputable: areas of concentrated urban poverty, particularly those predominantly African American, are very dangerous places.
Children exposed to repeated violence become traumatized; as African American psychologist Erwin Randolph Parson, describes it,
… from an early age, children living in the inner cities are exposed frequently to the use of drugs, guns, arson, and random violence. They witness injury, suffering, and death, and they respond to these events with fear and grief, often experiencing dramatic ruptures in their development. The list of psychological reactions is long and grim: hatred for self, profound loss of trust in the community and the world, tattered internalized moral values and ethics of caring, and a breaking down of the inner and outer sense of security and of reality.10
As a large-scale study from Atlanta found, “childhood trauma, adult trauma, and PTSD are highly associated with the perpetuation of interpersonal violence.”11 Dr. Kenny Ressler, leader of the Atlanta study, concluded that “the rates of PTSD we see are as high or higher than Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam veterans.”12
The effects of concentrated poverty are multigenerational. As sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s research has shown, growing up in an area of highly concentrated poverty drastically increases the likelihood both that you will remain poor, and that you will never leave the area. As he points out, “It is the cumulative effect of living in concentrated disadvantage, over generations, that is particularly severe.” Children who are the product of many generations of disadvantage “show substantially worse developmental outcomes when compared to families that live in poor neighborhoods for a single generation … even after we account for everything else in a family that might affect children’s development.”13 Poor black children are far more likely to grow up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than poor white children, and as a result, more likely to remain poor as adults.
There’s another piece to the puzzle, though, that goes back to the question of whether the people who live in the cities are benefiting from the economic growth that’s been taking place in recent years. Until relatively recently, many people suspected that the answer to that question was no, but had a hard time proving it. In recent years, though, the US Bureau of the Census has come through with the data; mining a combination of federal and state data sources, they’ve built a database to which they’ve given the daunting name Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics. More to the point, they’ve used this data to create a website called On-the-Map that shows where workers live, where they work, and how much they make, among other things, year by year from 2002 up to (as I write this) 2015.
The first thing that jumps out from this data is that, in pure numbers, there are a lot of jobs in many of America’s once-industrial cities, particularly the large ones. Baltimore has almost 50 percent more jobs in the city than workers who live in the city, Pittsburgh has more than twice as many jobs as workers. Second, most of the people who work in these cities don’t live there. There are almost 130,000 jobs in Newark, New Jersey, but only 22,000 of them are held by people who live in the city; all the others are held by commuters.
Every day, over 106,000 people come into the city to work, and every day, over 63,000 workers leave the city for jobs in the suburbs or other nearby cities. That’s typical. Every day, 204,000 people commute into Cleveland to work, and 72,000 leave the city to work in the suburbs. More city residents work in the suburbs than in the city; only 61,000 both live and work in Cleveland. The picture is even more extreme in many of the small cities and mill towns I described in chapter 7, which, with rare exceptions, are hemorrhaging jobs at a frightening clip.
From this perspective, there are three groups of workers. Workers who both live and work in the city (live in / work in); workers who live in the city and work in the suburbs (live in / work out); and workers who live in the suburbs and work in the city (live out / work in). If we look at how each of those three groups has changed since 2002, the results are startling. While the total number of jobs in Cleveland went up, although very slightly, over these years, the number of city residents holding those jobs (live in / work in) went down by 22,000, or 26 percent. In other words, there were 22,000 fewer city residents working in Cleveland in 2014 than in 2002. The number of city residents working in the suburbs dropped by a similar number; all in all, over only twelve years, the number of people living in Cleveland who had jobs—wherever they might work—went down by 45,000. Meanwhile, the number of people commuting into Cleveland to work went up by 25,000.
Eight out of Cleveland’s 177 census tracts actually gained workers; one was the census tract that included University Circle, the others were either in downtown or the gentrifying Tremont neighborhood. By comparison, the number of people with jobs living in the neighborhoods of Glenville and Forest Hills on the city’s East Side—only two miles and ten minutes by car from the Cleveland Clinic and job-rich University Circle—dropped by 2,500, or 40 percent.
Unlike Cleveland, Baltimore has been growing jobs at a respectable clip, adding 27,000 jobs from 2002 to 2015. But the same thing is happening there: fewer people who live in the city with jobs, more and more commuters. The number of people who live in Baltimore and also work in the city went down by 15,000, while the number of commuters went up by 42,000.
Not only are the ranks of commuters growing, as they take over more and more of the jobs that were once held by city residents, but they have the best jobs. They earn far more than the city residents who still work in the city, and their incomes have been growing faster. The median commuter working in Cleveland earned $50,000 in 2014, compared to just over $31,000 for city residents working in the city and $26,000 for city residents working in the suburbs. On top of this, commuters’ earnings rose by an average of 40 percent from 2002 to 2015, while city residents working in the city saw their earnings go up by 22 percent, and those commuting to the suburbs by only 15 percent. Since the rate of inflation over this period was 32.5 percent, they were falling behind in real dollar earnings.
This data actually underestimates the extent of the imbalance, because the citywide data lumps together the areas where the Young Grads are moving in—downtown, Tremont, and University Circle—with the rest of the city. These are the areas where the Cleveland residents are making good money, and where the number of workers is growing. In the rest of the city, neither is true. In fact, when I compared the rate of job loss to the poverty rate by census tract in Baltimore, I found the powerful correlation visible in figure 9-1.
The economic growth taking place in the downtowns and the job clusters like University Circle, or Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, or West Philadelphia, is not spilling over into the distressed, struggling neighborhoods that surround those areas. A few years ago, when I wrote an article about this, I called it “the uncoupling of the economic city.”14 What I meant was that the economic city—that is, the city defined by its jobs and employers—is disconnecting from the people who live in the city. Instead, the economic city is coming to rely more and more on a workforce who live, in some cases, in the city’s privileged neighborhoods, but more often outside the city entirely. Put bluntly, for the growing urban economy, the people who live in most of the city don’t matter a whole lot. Marxist economists, who argue that the new urban revival is exploiting the poor, have it dead wrong. The revival is ignoring the poor.
Figure 9-1 Change in number of jobs and poverty by census tract in Baltimore. (Source: US Census Bureau)
The question is: why is this happening? Many explanations have been offered. While each seems to explain part of the situation, it’s not clear they add up to a complete answer. The “spatial mismatch” hypothesis, which is the mismatch between where low-income minority households live and where the jobs have been moving, is well known. As low-income families remain stuck in the cities, due to housing costs and discrimination, the jobs have been moving to the suburbs.
That’s true, up to a point, but as we’ve seen, not only are there still a lot of jobs in the cities, but hundreds of thousands of inner-city workers commute every day to suburban jobs. It’s a bad bargain. Most of the jobs pay poorly, high transportation costs take a big bite out of what little they earn, and for many, the suburban jobs lock them into poverty rather than offering them a ticket out. But, despite everything, thousands of low-income people in every American city find their way to those jobs.
Another explanation is the jobs–education mismatch, which holds that more and more jobs require higher education or other specialized skills, which most city residents lack. Again, there’s some truth to that. If we look at the jobs in the cities, we find that a lot more of the jobs are held by college graduates than the percentage of college graduates among the adults who live in the cities. Over one-third of all the jobs in Cleveland are held by college graduates, but fewer than one out of six adults living in Cleveland have a BA or higher degree.
That said, many of those jobs may not require a college degree; a recent study by labor economist Stephen Rose found in 2014 that one out four college graduates held jobs for which they were overqualified.15 Part of that may be the product of a tight labor market, and part may be what some call “credential creep,” which is the tendency of employers to give preference to candidates with more education, even if the job itself doesn’t require those skills. Either way, the jobs–education mismatch disproportionately affects urban African Americans, who are less likely to have college degrees than whites; in Baltimore, only 14 percent of black adults had a BA or higher degree, compared to 55 percent of white adults. But, still, it only accounts for part of the picture.
The gap between inner-city residents and the job world is not just about measurable things like college degrees. The young man with a high school diploma from an inner-city school may lack the skills that even lower-skill jobs may require, such as reading and doing math at a ninth-grade level, or communicating clearly both orally and in writing. Just as important are the so-called soft skills—the person’s attitudes, work ethic, and ability to relate to co-workers and customers; as one retail HR executive told researchers Phillip Moss and Chris Tilly, “I tell my personnel managers … if they don’t smile, don’t hire them.”16
As soft skills become more important, that may work against many African Americans—not all, but particularly young men, and particularly young men from isolated, concentrated-poverty communities, where the culture of the street rewards behaviors very different from those rewarded by mainstream culture. Although there is little doubt that discrimination is a factor, it is telling that of the personnel managers interviewed by Moss and Tilly, those in businesses located in the inner city were more than three times as likely to have a negative view of black men’s soft skills than those in businesses in the suburbs.
There’s another factor, too, that may have more impact than people have tended to give it—what Northwestern professor Lauren Rivera calls “cultural matching,” or the tendency of people to hire other people who look or act like them. Rivera, who studied hiring patterns in elite law, banking, and consulting firms, found that in these firms, cultural matching is built in; as one law firm partner told her, “In our new associates, we are first and foremost looking for cultural compatibility. Someone who … will fit in.”17
While cultural fit is not necessarily about race (the partner Rivera quoted was black), race is likely to be a factor, particularly in non-elite settings where people making hiring decisions may not be as attuned to diversity concerns. Most people doing most hiring are likely to be white. In a famous 2004 study entitled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan found that résumés with “white” names were 50 percent more likely to be called in for interviews than those with “black” names.18
These points are not new, even if the particular statistics may be. Fifty years ago, the Kerner Commission painted a bleak, unsparing picture of racially segregated concentrated-poverty areas, arguing that “the culture of poverty that results from unemployment and family disorganization generates a system of ruthless, exploitative relationships within the ghetto,” and singling out the high rate of unemployment and underemployment among black men as a particularly critical factor. The commission’s recommendations, as relevant today as they were then, include “motivating the hard-core unemployed,” removing “artificial barriers to employment and promotion,” providing “quality education in ghetto schools,” and “increasing efforts to eliminate de facto segregation.”19
It would not be fair to say that no progress has been made since then. The poverty rate among those classified at the time as “nonwhite,” or mainly African American, in 1966 was over 40 percent. Today, among African Americans it is 25 percent. That is still far too high, but is nevertheless a vast improvement. The benefits of that improvement, though, are felt more in the suburban areas where upwardly mobile black families have moved than in the central cities. The poverty rate for black residents of St. Louis and Milwaukee is 35 percent, and in Cleveland and Buffalo, over 40 percent. In this respect at least, these cities are still living in the 1960s.
For many decades, people have grappled with the question of how to create meaningful opportunities for better jobs and careers, and how to break the seemingly endless cycle of intergenerational poverty. Some of their efforts, indeed, have been successful, and many others have shown promise. At the same time, as we will see, in the absence of any effort to grapple with the larger systemic issues driving the persistence of poverty, much of the experience of the last few decades can be summed up as one step forward, one—and perhaps two—steps backward.
From a national perspective, the most successful efforts have been those that have increased peoples’ incomes, like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), or allowed the poor to meet their most fundamental needs. “Although it was not originally billed as an anti-poverty program,” Brookings researchers Natalie Holmes and Alan Berube write, “in its forty years, the EITC has become one of the nation’s most effective tools for lifting low-income workers and their families above the poverty line.”20 A 2013 Brookings study estimated that the EITC lifted 6.2 million people, half of them children, out of poverty. 21
The EITC gives low-income working families with children a refund of their federal income tax and social security payments, with the size of the refund based on their income, marital status, and number of children. Up to a certain point, the refund goes up as the family’s earnings go up, helping to offset the way some other programs reduce or eliminate benefits as a family’s earnings grow. The EITC has more long-term impacts as well; as Robert Greenstein of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes, “an impressive body of recent research indicates [that] starting from infancy—when higher tax credits have been linked with more prenatal care, less maternal stress, and better infant health—children who benefit from expanded tax credits do better throughout childhood and have higher odds of finishing high school and going to college.”22
Other federal programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), once known as Food Stamps; the Housing Choice Voucher program, formerly known as Section 8; and Medicaid, which provides essential medical care to low-income people, do not put cash directly into people’s pockets, but enable them to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, and health care. The SNAP and Medicaid programs are entitlements, meaning that if you are poor enough, you are entitled to the benefit. Vouchers are not entitlements. Indeed, according to the probably optimistic official numbers, only one out of every four eligible poor households receives any assistance to help pay the rent. Housing vouchers are like a lottery. Lots of people buy tickets but most of the contestants go home empty-handed.
If you are poor and don’t win the voucher lottery, a series of things happen. First, your rent is likely to be 50 percent or more of your total income. The median rent in Pittsburgh in 2015 was $858 per month, or over $10,000 per year. That’s two-thirds of the gross income of a single mother making $15,000 a year at a retail job in the suburbs. That means two things. First, to quote Matt Desmond’s Evicted again, “If Arleen or Vanetta didn’t have to dedicate 70 or 80 percent of their income to rent, they could keep their kids fed and clothed and off the streets. They could settle down in one neighborhood and enroll their kids in one school. […] They could open a savings account or buy their children toys and books, perhaps even a home computer.”23
Second, it means that Arleen and Vanetta, for whom making the rent each month is a constant struggle, are living on the edge. Anything can push them off the edge—a medical problem, a balky car that won’t start, a late bus, reduced hours at work, a missed welfare appointment. When that happens, they can’t make their rent payment and they lose their apartment. Either they are evicted through a formal legal process, or they leave beforehand, knowing they have no way out. As Desmond writes,
even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. They used to draw crowds. […] These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. […] These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices. […] Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb.24
In Baltimore, thirty families are evicted every weekday of the year.
Things would be far worse for millions of American families without the EITC, SNAP, Medicaid, and what few vouchers are available, but these are survival, not opportunity, measures. If we raised the national minimum wage to $15, as many propose, it would improve matters for many people. It would probably be a good idea, but one can’t be certain, since it is impossible to tell in advance whether the benefits to those low-income people who would see their wages go up would exceed the negative effects of what jobs might be lost outright or moved overseas. As with so many other complex policy proposals, the limited research that’s been done is all over the map.
As with all sweeping policies, like NAFTA, the way costs and benefits would be distributed is likely to be uneven. More-affluent (and expensive) areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, where wages for low-skill jobs are already usually much higher than the current minimum, would probably lose fewer jobs than low-wage cities and rural areas, where as many as half of the jobs pay less than a $15 hourly wage currently. As with so many other economic policies, it is more likely to benefit the geographic winners, the strong-economy coastal areas, and further exacerbate the already vast gap between people living in those areas and the struggling areas inland. At the same time, though, a meaningfully higher minimum wage would add not only money but some measure of dignity to the people holding many of the jobs our society needs despite being unwilling to pay the people who hold those jobs a living wage.
Income supports and a social safety net are essential if millions of Americans are to be able to live in even minimal decency, with even a modicum of security from the pernicious effects of hunger, ill-heath, eviction, and homelessness. Income supports, though, should not be confused with opportunity. To paraphrase the slogan of the Oakland-based Family Independence Initiative, “They make poverty tolerable, when we can make it escapable.”25 Opportunity means at a minimum the ability to find and keep a job or open a business that can enable a worker to escape poverty and provide a stable, decent living for her family. That is a high bar, since forces well out of any city’s control limit the extent to which many jobs today pay well enough to meet that standard. But the critical factors appear to be education and skills, including the soft skills I mentioned earlier.
The biggest single step to getting a good job and making good money in twenty-first-century America is getting a four-year college degree. On the average, the typical person with a BA or BS degree makes 72 percent more than someone with a high school diploma, up from 53 percent in 1997. This adds up to a lifetime earnings boost of roughly a million dollars, far more than the cost of getting the degree. Someone with an advanced degree, such as a law degree or a PhD, makes more than twice as much as the average high school graduate.26 As figure 9-2 also shows, getting a two-year community college degree provides little wage boost over the high school diploma, although it does open up a wider range of job opportunities.
Figure 9-2 The education premium: median annual earnings by highest level of education. (Source: US Census Bureau)
As a result, it’s not surprising that a lot of effort has gone into creating programs to increase the ability of inner-city youths to go to college. One well-known program, which has spawned a series of imitators, is the Kalamazoo Promise. Kalamazoo is a small city in western Michigan which has a relatively strong economic base, but suffers from considerable distress and a high poverty rate. In 2005, a group of anonymous donors announced that they would pay the tuition at any public college or university in the state of Michigan for any student graduating from the Kalamazoo public schools (KPS) who had been in the system since the ninth grade or earlier. The scholarship paid 100 percent of the cost for students who had been at KPS since first grade, down to 65 percent for those who had been in KPS only since ninth grade. It was not linked to merit or financial need, and was “first-dollar” money; that is, students did not have to max out other sources of financial aid in order to receive the Promise funds. From 2005 to 2014, the still-anonymous donors have spent $61 million on scholarships, with spending running currently at $10 to $11 million per year.
Ten years after the program started, Timothy Bartik and his colleagues at Kalamazoo’s W. E. Upjohn Institute decided to find out what effect the Promise had on KPS graduates’ college outcomes, by comparing KPS graduates who had been in the system from ninth grade or earlier—and were eligible for scholarships—with those who had entered the system after ninth grade, and thus were not. They found that the students receiving Promise scholarships significantly out-performed the others in three areas: the percentage going to four-year colleges, the number of credits they signed up for in the first two years, and most important, the number getting a BA or equivalent degree in six years. The increases were significant for low-income students and for African American students, although the racial gap between white and black outcomes was still wide.27
All of the improvement, however, for African American students was among female graduates. The program had no effect on the outcomes of male African American KPS graduates. This reflects a larger problem, the declining share of men among African American college students and graduates. In 2014, not only were 63 percent of all black students in higher education women, and 70 percent of all in graduate and professional schools women, but graduation rates for African American women were far higher than for men.28 Many reasons have been offered for this disparity, including the ways many of the most challenging problems of inner-city life, including the effects of violence and incarceration, the absence of engaged, present fathers, and the dynamics of street culture, disproportionately affect young men; as commentator William Raspberry put it, “Inner-city conditions present a conspiracy of circumstances that almost impel young black men into trouble.”29
The growing network of KIPP, or Knowledge Is Power Program, charter schools is an ambitious national effort to increase the number of low-income and minority students who go to college. Founded in 1995 by two alumni of the Teach for America program, in 2017 KIPP had 88,000 children and youths enrolled in 209 schools around the United States, mostly middle schools but including pre-kindergarten through high school. Ninety-five percent of their students are African American or Latino, and 88 percent are eligible for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program, meaning that their family income is no more than 1.85 times the federal poverty level. KIPP relentlessly focuses on getting their students to go to college; as they sum up their goals, “We aspire for 75 percent of our students to earn four-year degrees and all of our students to have the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college if they so choose.”30
KIPP schools appear to have a strong impact on student achievement. A 2013 evaluation by the well-regarded Princeton-based research firm Mathematica found that “the average impact of KIPP on student achievement is positive, statistically significant, and educationally substantial.”31 A preliminary report on college outcomes, published by KIPP in 2011, found that “33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school ten or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.”32 Given the profile of their students, these are decent results, even if they fall short of KIPP’s ambitious goal.
This finding was based on the first few KIPP schools, though, and it is not clear what current data would show as the network of KIPP schools has grown all but exponentially. There seems to be some question whether KIPP can maintain its early results; even the Mathematica study found that many individual KIPP schools showed little or no student improvement. KIPP has also come under fire for its high student attrition rate.
Even more impressive results have been reported from the Match Public Charter School in Boston, a comprehensive program from pre-kindergarten through high school. Match shares many features with KIPP, including an even more determined focus on preparing its students for college. Even more than KIPP, though, it aims to be what Match High School principal Hannah Larkin calls a “high expectations, high support” school, providing at least two hours per day of individual or small-group tutoring in addition to conventional class-based instruction.33 According to the Match website, 51 percent of the students who graduated from Match between 2004 and 2010 have since graduated from a four-year college, an impressive figure by any standard. The Match student body is largely similar to that of Boston’s noncompetitive public schools, but with a much larger share of African American students than in the city’s public schools.
This model gets results. As a 2016 study by team of scholars led by MIT economist Joshua Angrist that carefully controlled for student body composition concluded, “A growing body of evidence indicates that many urban charter schools have large, positive effects on the test scores of disadvantaged students. Oversubscribed charter schools in Boston increase the test scores of low-income students by a third of a standard deviation a year—enough to eliminate the black-white test score gap in a few years of attendance.”34 Independent of test scores, these charter school students were more likely to take Advanced Placement tests, did significantly better on SATs, and—if continuing to college—were significantly more likely to go to four-year rather than two-year colleges than their Boston public school peers.
Massachusetts severely caps the number of charter-school student slots, as a result of which high-performing schools like Match are forced to turn away hundreds of prospective students every year. They regulate the ones that open, and many non-performing schools have been ordered closed by state education authorities. Accountability is critical to the system; although there are some exceptions, generally charter schools that do not follow some version of the “high expectations, high support” model perform no better, and often worse, than public schools. Similarly, voucher-based school choice programs may actually, as a study of the Louisiana Scholarship Program found, “dramatically reduce student achievement,” largely because of lack of quality control among receiving private schools.35 Although the study did not address this, the negative impacts of low-quality options in the system, as with Detroit’s troubled charter schools, are magnified for low-income families with limited information and limited resources.
Both KIPP and Match (particularly KIPP) have been widely criticized, however, for their highly structured and discipline-oriented educational approach. It is hard to sort out this issue, particularly for someone with no particular expertise in educational psychology. Although any program that follows a strict “no excuses” discipline policy is likely to appear hard-hearted and punitive from the outside, there is little question that a rigorous structure is important for mastery, as anyone who has truly mastered a musical instrument or a demanding craft knows. This may be particularly important for children from low-income, inner-city families where structure and discipline may be in short supply.
The relative success of Match or most of the KIPP schools does not necessarily translate to success for charter schools across the board. Charter schools, which have tended to locate in high-poverty, high-minority cities, are wildly uneven, as are the state laws governing them. In Detroit, where Michigan’s laws allow almost anyone to open a charter school and run it with little accountability, reporter Kate Zernicke described how “the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. [Schools] are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.”36 With no independent machinery in place to shut down poorly performing charter schools, failing schools, mostly run for profit, prey on low-income parents with few mobility options.
In Detroit, a child of well-educated, well-to-do parents, who can not only evaluate all of the options but has the resources to take advantage of the best ones wherever in the region they may be, can and probably will do well. The child of the poor single mother in the heart of the ghetto, despite all the options on paper, is no less likely to end up in a troubled, failing school than in a system in which a dysfunctional public school is the only option. Rather than foster equity, the Detroit model of school choice exacerbates inequality.
The Detroit charter school story is as much about politics and power as it is about education. Unfortunately, much of the vitriolic ongoing debate over charter schools and public schools can be described that way, with opponents pointing to charter-school support by the “non-democratic foundations of billionaires such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.”37 One outspoken blogger has compared KIPP schools to World War II concentration camps,38 while another described them as “total-compliance isolation camps that receive public dollars to support this social-control strategy that is top priority with Gates, Broad, and the Walton Klan.”39 On the other side, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education and a long-time advocate for charter schools and school choice, described public education as “a closed system, a closed industry, a closed market. It’s a monopoly, a dead end.”40 Neither side likes the other much, but the rhetoric directed at charter schools by their adversaries has a particularly venomous quality. In the course of the debate, if it can be dignified by that term, the interests of children and their families can easily get lost.
Leaving aside the charter-school debate, does it really make sense to try to get everyone—or nearly everyone—to graduate from college? It’s debatable whether there are as many jobs today that really need a college graduate as there already are college graduates. Aside from the ranks of overqualified baristas and Uber drivers, this leads not only to the “credential creep” I mentioned earlier, but to redefining entire occupations, like registered nurses that have historically not required a college degree, to require one. Meanwhile, that approach does not offer too much hope for the large number of adults trapped in poverty.
Over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the greatest demand for jobs—combining job growth and turnover—will come in four sectors: health care, food preparation and service, sales, and office and administrative support. Some, although far from all, don’t pay too badly, while others offer at least the potential to move up in a company or a field. In all four areas, even health care, half or more of the jobs do not require a college degree. What they do require, though, in most cases is some level of specialized training, as well as a healthy measure of soft skills.
The challenge of creating opportunity for any significant number of low-income inner-city adults, however, goes well beyond providing training and inculcating soft skills. Transportation constraints keep many inner-city residents from getting access to suburban jobs, or drive them to make commutes that impose unsustainable burdens on their time and limited money. Criminal records, moreover, block an increasing number of people, disproportionately black and disproportionately male, from getting jobs.
Urban planners and policy wonks in the United States are enamored with light rail and similar fixed-route systems, which are great to look at and, like stadiums, offer politicians wonderful photo ops. They are spectacularly expensive, and they can be very useful as a transit system for high-density corridors or as a strategy to foster revival or gentrification. As a result, they may be a legitimate, albeit costly, part of the way a city tries to foster economic growth. What they do not do, however, is improve mobility and job access for the great majority of lower-income workers, who usually do not live along the high-intensity corridors, and whose jobs tend to be scattered all over the region.
While most workers, even among the poor, commute by car, the percentage of low-income workers who rely on buses is substantial; in Newark, where three out of four residents work outside the city, nearly half of all poor workers rely on public transportation to get to work, while in St. Louis, over a quarter of all poor workers do. For them, it’s about buses, the historic poor stepsister of the public transportation industry. In most parts of the United States, buses are the only transit option for most areas. But they tend to be slow and run infrequently; the only bus line from Cleveland running eastward to the major suburban job center of Beachwood runs only once every thirty to forty-five minutes during rush hours, taking nearly an hour to cover seven miles, while large parts of highly urbanized Cuyahoga County lack even that modest bus service.
The neglect of bus service in the United States is starting to change; Daniel Vock writes in a recent issue of Governing magazine that “in the last few years, transit agencies in more than half a dozen major cities have totally revamped their bus routes to focus on frequent, reliable service to job centers and dense neighborhoods.”41 The question, of course, is which job centers, and which neighborhoods. Fast buses from reviving high-density neighborhoods to downtown may not help low-income workers. Conversely, increasing bus service in inner-city areas and to dispersed suburban job centers may not fill buses, even as it may help growing numbers of low-income workers find work with less-burdensome commutes. That means, in turn, that better bus service for low-income areas is likely to cost more money, which legislatures as well as voters have been historically reluctant to provide. This might change once autonomous or self-driving vehicles become widely available; eliminating the cost of drivers on low-ridership routes might well make them more financially feasible. The price of that, of course, is the loss of many relatively well-paying blue-collar jobs.
It might well be better for public systems to run their big, expensive, forty-plus passenger buses on major arteries and high-utilization routes, and allow small, informal systems of minibuses, vans, and car-sharing to spring up in between. Many of these already exist at the margins of the legal system. As Lisa Margonelli writes, “America’s twentieth-largest bus service—hauling 120,000 riders a day—is profitable and also illegal. It’s not really a bus service at all, but a willy-nilly aggregation of 350 licensed and 500 unlicensed privately owned ‘dollar vans’ that roam the streets of Brooklyn and Queens, picking up passengers from street corners where city buses are either missing or inconvenient.”42
In most American cities, public transportation is a closely held monopoly. Even if the van or car is fully licensed and insured, New York and most other cities do not allow their owners to pick up riders on the street. Legalizing local, privately owned vans and car-sharing operations, and encouraging lower-income and immigrant entrepreneurs to provide those services in their neighborhoods, would almost certainly provide a more efficient, cost-effective service than bus operators could provide, while increasing the income of thousands of struggling lower-income families. A variation on this theme, which has been gaining currency, is to have government subsidize rides on Uber or Lyft for low-income commuters, either to their jobs or to the nearest public transit stop.
Finally, in many cities, particular smaller, lower-density ones, an even simpler solution exists: help low-income workers buy cars. Ways to Work, a nonprofit lender based in Milwaukee, provides low-interest, no-down-payment car loans of up to $8,000 to low-income workers, enough to buy a good-quality, reliable used car. An independent evaluation found that large numbers of their borrowers saw significant increases in their income, less reliance on welfare assistance, and improved credit scores, as a result. The same study concluded that benefits to the borrowers and to taxpayers, in terms of reduced public-assistance costs, amounted to $2.48 for every $1 invested.43
An even bigger problem is the effect of people’s criminal records. That was far less of a problem twenty-five or thirty years ago, when far fewer people had criminal records than today, information on them was less readily available, and hiring criteria were less stringent. Today, 25 percent of non-incarcerated black men have a felony conviction on their record,44 while the Sentencing Project notes that one out of three Americans has a criminal record.45
Harvard sociologist Devah Pager measured the impact of both race and a criminal record on employment in a 2001 study in Milwaukee, where she sent carefully matched white and black “testers” to apply for entry-level, unskilled jobs.46 Jobs with legal restrictions on hiring ex-offenders were carefully excluded. At each stage, certain testers were randomly assigned a “criminal record” when applying for the job. The role of having a “criminal record” was rotated between testers to ensure that differences in results were not the result of subtle differences in the manner or appearance of the tester. She then measured how often the testers would receive either a job offer or a callback.
The results were stunning, as shown in figure 9-3. First, black testers overall were far less likely to get a callback than whites. Second, criminal records made a much bigger difference for black than for white applicants; while a criminal record reduced a white tester’s chances by 50 percent, it reduced the chances of a black tester by nearly two-thirds.
People are trying hard to tackle this issue. In 2003, a group of formerly incarcerated organizers met in Oakland, California, to figure out how to combat discrimination based on past criminal history. They created an organization they called All of Us or None, which has spearheaded an amazing grassroots effort that’s led to over half of the states adopting “ban the box” laws barring employers from including the question “Have you been convicted of a crime?” on initial employment and other applications. Iowa has gone a step further, enacting a special income-tax deduction for employers who hire ex-offenders that can be worth up to $20,000 per year.47
Figure 9-3 Percentage called back: How the effect of a criminal record varies for black and white job applicants. (Source: Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record”)
Other organizations are focusing on the immediate needs of the more than 600,000 people, largely poor, often psychologically damaged, and disproportionately black and male, who are released from prison and sent back to city streets each year. Chicago’s Safer Foundation is one of the more ambitious of many organizations across the country that works with ex-offenders. Safer sees good jobs as the cornerstone of their work, but in addition to finding jobs for clients, they build in services to improve their basic educational skills and job readiness, and support them once they’ve been placed on the job. Safer helped 4,200 ex-offenders secure employment in 2014, with three-quarters of the people they placed still on the job after a year. Safer’s efforts reduce the likelihood of going back to prison within three years from the statewide average of 47 percent down to 24 percent for all of their clients, and to 16 percent for those who have held their job for at least a year. Safer claims to have saved the state of Illinois $300 million in prison costs over the past four years, and saved the population at large untold amounts in crimes not committed.48
Safer’s work is not inexpensive. Their operations cost $23 million a year, of which $19 million comes from government contracts and most of the rest from grants. Organizations like Safer doing similar work around the country are in a constant scramble for funds, even though it’s a reasonable estimate that, when one adds up savings in prison costs, welfare costs, and the cost of the crimes not committed, programs like Safer save the public four or more dollars for every dollar they spend.
A different approach to a similar problem was followed by the program created by the One Baltimore for Jobs (1B4J) program, created by the city’s Mayor’s Office of Employment Development (MOED) in 2015 with a two-year demonstration grant from the US Department of Labor. Focusing on four carefully selected areas—manufacturing, health care, construction, and logistics/transportation—the city “sought to demonstrate that a workforce system could be built that fused together occupational skills training with key support services.”49
MOED found that all the pieces were already there, but as they put it, “previously, grants for training and support services were made separately and the ‘partnerships’ were more of a hope than a reality.” MOED entered into contracts with nineteen separate organizations to integrate their services into a single system of training, education, and support. What stands out was their focus on removing the legal barriers to their trainees getting work. MOED contracted with Maryland Legal Aid and the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service to work one-on-one with each participant to identify issues in their personal history that could be resolved, such as judgments, criminal convictions, or failure to pay child support, and to resolve them so that they would not prevent their obtaining a job in the field for which they were being trained.
Child support issues take on particular importance, since large numbers of inner-city men have outstanding unmet child support orders. In a telling example of a well-intended but counterproductive public policy, forty-nine of fifty states suspend or remove the driver’s licenses (as well as other professional or occupational licenses) of people who fail to pay child support, thus reducing or removing entirely their ability to continue making a living, and all but guaranteeing that their child support obligations will remain unpaid. To fix this, MOED formed a partnership with the Maryland child support agency to reinstate participants’ driver’s licenses, and where needed, resize their child support obligations to better match their earnings.
In the first year and a half of the 1B4J program, more than 900 Baltimore residents had enrolled in training, 750 had completed training, and more than 500 had begun jobs in one of the four fields for which they had trained. Sadly, the program came to an end when the federal grant ran out at the end of 2017.
A program that looks at another aspect of the opportunity problem, and has actually convinced state government to pay them for results, is the Minneapolis-based Twin Cities RISE!, or TCR. Twin Cities RISE! goes back to some of the underlying issues behind the opportunity challenge, with a model they call Personal Empowerment. As Steven Rothschild, the former General Mills executive who founded TCR, puts it, “At RISE! we learned the need for empowerment training the hard way. In the first few years we faced a bewildering situation: too many people were dropping out during the program and even after working in the jobs we’d found for them. Something would happen—we often didn’t know what—and they were gone. We were enormously frustrated.” Rothschild goes on,
We knew we were doing good work. We’d taught our participants the behaviors they needed to succeed. Show up on time, dress appropriately. Don’t get into arguments. We knew they practiced these things for a while, but then they would revert back to their old behavior. […] We came to realize that participants couldn’t sustain the behaviors of accountability because fundamentally they believed, as one put it, “you’re going to get screwed, no matter what you do.” So if that’s the case—if you think your future is hopeless and you’re powerless to do anything about it—why behave like a responsible working person?50
The result was a model that Rothschild called Personal Empowerment, drawn from the theories of emotional intelligence and from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, designed “to help patients address problems of dysfunctional emotions, behaviors, and cognitions.”51 As Tom Streitz, TCR’s current CEO, puts it, “We not only teach somebody the hard skills to get a job, but we also teach them to value themselves and to have the confidence and belief in themselves that they know they’re worthy of a great job.”52 While they don’t call it that, Twin Cities RISE! is focusing on healing the trauma of life in concentrated poverty and segregation. Most of their participants (they don’t call them “clients”) are African American men. Four out of five are unemployed, and two-thirds have criminal histories.
TCR starts with personal empowerment, but they don’t end there. They work with employers who tell them, in Streitz’s words, that “these are the hard skills we need”; then they either provide the training, or work with other groups in the Twin Cities to put together training for the skills the employers are looking for. They then provide each participant with a coach who stays with him, helping him over the rough spots, for two years after they’ve been placed on the job. This sort of coaching, which we see in the Safer Foundation’s programs and elsewhere, is doubly important. It helps the newly placed worker avoid being undone by any of the many pitfalls that inevitably arise as they try to stabilize their lives, while it gives the employer a comfort level in hiring someone from TCR, knowing that there’s somebody supportive in the picture to reach out to in case of a problem.
TCR is a smaller operation than the Safer Foundation, with an annual budget running around $3.5 million. About 20 percent of that comes from an ongoing pay-for-performance contract with the state of Minnesota. The state pays for participants’ training, but only after each has been placed in a job that pays at least $20,000 per year and $10,000 per year more than what he earned the previous year. For each participant meeting the target, the state pays TCR $9,000. TCR estimates that the State of Minnesota has received a 600 percent return on investment from its support “due to reduced government subsidies, increased tax receipts, and reduced criminal justice costs, the result of TCR graduates getting and retaining good jobs”—or, since 1997, savings of more than $35 million to Minnesota taxpayers.
To varying degrees, some of these models may make good liberals—and some who are not liberals—cringe, especially when they seem to involve poor black people and to be driven by privileged young white men and women. Whether it’s the discipline-based model of the KIPP schools or the therapy-driven approach (although they would not call it that) of Twin Cities RISE!, these models all implicitly or explicitly assume that the people in they serve, whether small children, teenagers, or adult ex-offenders, are damaged in some fashion. That, in turn, is interpreted as an attack on an entire culture. As I have shown earlier, there is considerable evidence, though, that the combination of growing up or living in poverty, combined with living in an area of concentrated poverty, particularly when you add the further layer of racial discrimination pervasive in American society, is damaging, and that that damage blocks, for many different reasons, many individuals’ ability to succeed in the mainstream society.
Some people, particularly those who see the American capitalist mainstream economy and society as pernicious, whether for cultural, ideological, or other reasons, would question the value of mainstream success and suggest that it isn’t worth the compromises that have to be made. While one can certainly identify plenty of things wrong with that economy and the culture it reflects, the fact remains that a society has only one mainstream at a time, and indeed, that from a world perspective the American mainstream is one of the more open in terms of its acceptance, albeit within bounds, of differences. The great majority of people of all income levels and conditions of life are neither rebellious poets nor radical revolutionaries, and they want above all to be able to live a decent, productive, satisfying life. That is something difficult if not impossible to do outside the mainstream of society and the economy.
If there is one overarching lesson that emerges from this survey, it is that lifting people out of the trap of multigenerational poverty can be done, but is complicated and involves many different moving parts. The evidence is compelling that children want to learn and adults want to succeed, whatever their backgrounds. Breaking down the barriers to success, though, involves working in many different ways with many different types of people at different stages in their life’s journey, from the toddler who may be unprepared to function in school, to the ex-offender who needs to rebuild his life, and the single mom desperately trying to juggle rent, transportation, children, and a physically taxing, dead-end job hours away. There is no single magic bullet.
People are starting to look at this challenge more broadly. In 2014, Mayor Greg Fisher of Louisville announced a citywide initiative he called Cradle to Career, focusing on four parallel “pillars”: increasing kindergarten readiness, ensuring K–12 success, successful transition to and completion of postsecondary education, and building a qualified twenty-first-century workforce.53 Mayor Fisher brought together four key partners, each of whom was already focusing on one of the four areas, to work together in a coordinated strategy rather than in their separate “silos,” and since 2014 has hosted an annual Cradle to Career Summit in which each partner shared their successes and challenges in meeting their goals.
A more recent and more tightly focused effort has begun to emerge in Newark, New Jersey, where in the summer of 2017 Mayor Ras Baraka, along with the Newark Alliance, a business roundtable, unveiled Newark 2020, a plan to “connect 2,020 Newark residents to local work that pays a living wage by 2020,” in the words of Newark Alliance CEO Kimberly McLain. Newark, with New Jersey’s largest concentration of educational and medical institutions, along with some 20,000 jobs at Newark Airport and Port Newark, has the jobs, but few of them are held by local people. As part of Newark 2020, many of the city’s key employers have adopted specific hiring targets to enable the city to reach its goal.
This may appear to be an ambitious target, but it may not be as ambitious as it seems. With over 20,000 unemployed adults in Newark, and with turnover alone creating an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 openings in the city each year for jobs that don’t need a college degree, 2,020 in three years will hardly make a dent. At the same time, unless the city and its partners have the ability to provide a pipeline of workers who are ready to take the jobs that are being offered—with respect to attitudes, soft skills, and specific job skills—it may be a hard target to reach. To her credit, McLain recognizes at least part of this. “This is not an initiative just to connect 2,000 people to work, and then check the box,” she says. “What we’re trying to do is create a system … [so that] we will no longer need these initiatives, because we have shifted the culture and the mindset of our companies.”54
That’s important, because the world is full of impressive-looking oneshot efforts that don’t lead to any real change, but questions remain, both in Newark and in Louisville. Changing the mindset of employers is critical, but so is changing the mindset not only of the workers, but of the entire system designed to help those workers overcome the barriers to stable, secure employment. That system in many places tends to be fragmented and disorganized, with many organizations working with little connection to one another, and having a depressing tendency to cherry-pick from the client pool those that can get into decent jobs with the least time and expense on the agency’s part, which makes their numbers look better. An in-depth study of Newark’s workforce development “landscape” done fifteen years ago found that “the lack of trust and reliability in the local workforce system seems to be a predominant factor in [local employers’] hiring decisions.”55 It is not clear so far how much progress Newark has made toward creating a system that will indeed ensure that those 2,020 jobs go to people who would not otherwise have a shot, rather than people who will find decent jobs with or without special initiatives like Newark 2020.
That, in turn, goes to the heart of the challenge for America’s cities. The crisis of sustained multigenerational poverty is at the heart of the growing polarization of these cities between rich and poor, and between white and black. It is the poor or near-poor who are stuck in the poverty trap, are not benefiting from their cities’ revival, and need the most help breaking out of the trap. Initiatives like Cradle to Career or Newark 2020, which on their face are agnostic about race and poverty, may benefit some of them, or only a few of them.
At the same time, it would be foolish to pretend that, over and above the cost and difficulty of such programs, there are no political obstacles to mounting efforts explicitly targeted at poor people, largely black, at a scale large enough to make a difference, particularly in today’s political climate. Indeed, the entire issue of inequality in reviving older cities, as in many other aspects of twenty-first-century American society, is closely interwoven with questions of politics and power, a subject we will turn to in the next chapter.