Tag Archives: poor neighborhoods

Access to cars helps poorer residents achieve better life outcomes

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Cars are expensive to own and operate yet a new study suggests they can help poorer residents:

Housing voucher recipients with cars tended to live and remain in higher-opportunity neighborhoods—places with lower poverty rates, higher social status, stronger housing markets, and lower health risks. Cars are also associated with improved neighborhood satisfaction and better employment outcomes. Among Moving to Opportunity families, those with cars were twice as likely to find a job and four times as likely to remain employed.

The importance of automobiles arises not due to the inherent superiority of driving, but because public transit systems in most metropolitan areas are slow, inconvenient, and lack sufficient metropolitan-wide coverage to rival the automobile.

More research is needed to determine if the relationship is causal or associative, that is, whether the car is the catalyst or if there is something deeper at work, of which the car is simply one manifestation. Cars are expensive to purchase and to maintain, even more so for families with severely limited resources. A low-income household that is somehow able, inclined, or afforded the opportunity to buy a car might also do many other things to get ahead. Motivation, opportunity, or both could be key.

Yet our current findings are enough to raise important questions.

For example, should government welfare programs facilitate automobile access or ownership? In some states, a car would push families over the asset limit for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, making those families ineligible for help.

In a society that often structures space around cars, this is not too surprising, particularly for poorer residents in suburbs and more sprawling areas. Yet, as this summary notes, providing cars is not necessarily easy (expensive) or desirable in the long run (perpetuating problems with cars like pollution and sprawl).

This could lead to some interesting consequences for poorer Americans. If they are increasingly in suburbs or are pushed out of walkable urban neighborhoods by gentrifiers, having to have a car is another barrier to moving up the economic ladder. In other words, walkable neighborhoods – think New Urbanism –  are the rage amongst urban millennials and others who want vibrant mixed-use neighborhoods. But, their quest for such spaces may not leave much room who would really benefit the most from cheaper transportation through walkability and mass transit.

Call for more comparative study of poor urban neighborhoods using new techniques

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Urban sociologist Mario Small recently argued sociologists and others need to adopt some new approaches to studying poor urban neighborhoods:

Small, who is also dean of UChicago’s Division of the Social Sciences, studies urban neighborhoods and has studied the diversity of experiences for people living in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country.

Studying only a few neighborhoods extensively fails to capture important differences, he said in a talk, “Poverty and Organizational Density,” at a session Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago…

“The experience of poverty varies from city to city, influenced by neighborhood factors such as commercial activity, access to transportation and social services, and other facets of organizational density,” Small said.

He explained that new sources of information, ranging from open city data to detailed, high-resolution imagery from commercial mapping services, provide new opportunities to compare the experience of the poor among multiple cities, in turn pointing cities and service providers toward optimal decision-making about policies, investment, or other interventions.

One of these changes is driven by changes in technology, the ability to collect big data. This can help sociologists and others go beyond surveys and neighborhood observations. Robert Sampson does some of this in Great American City with the ability to map the social networks and neighborhood moves of residents from poorer neighborhoods. Big data will be enable us to go even further.

The second suggestion, however, is something that sociologists could have been doing for decades. Poor neighborhoods in certain cities tend to get the lion’s share of attention, places like Chicago, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. In contrast, poor neighborhoods in places like Dallas, Miami, Seattle, Denver, and Las Vegas get a lot less attention. Perhaps I should return to a presentation I made years ago at the Society for the Study of Social Problems about this very topic where I suggested some key factors that led to this lack of comparative study…

Social network analysis of Chicago violence show differences in risk, differences compared to Boston

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Read a summary of recent research by sociologist Andrew Papachristos about social networks and violence in Chicago:

Take, for instance, a 2013 paper, published with Yale colleague Christopher Wilderman in the American Journal of Public Health. It’s set in a community in Chicago with a litany of familar risk factors: half of all households were led by a single female; 43 percent of the 82,000 residents had less than a high-school education; a third of households were below the poverty line. And the homicide rate, over the five years of the study, was 55.2 per 100,000, about four times the citywide rate (Daniel Hertz’s maps of homicide rates by police district are a good way of putting that in context; it’s high.)…

Simply being arrested during this period increases the aggregate homicide rate by nearly 50%, but being in a network component with a homicide victim increases the homicide rate by a staggering 900% (from 55.2 to 554.1)…

Even in this extremely abstracted form, from a third paper by Papachristos you can see a remarkable contrast between gang violence in Chicago and Boston. Each node is a gang; each line is a homicide or shooting; each bidirectional line is a reciprocal homicide…

Chicago’s social network of homicide is a knotty mess: 98 percent of all Chicago gangs were connected within the city’s homicide network during that timeframe, 32 percent higher than Boston’s shooting network. The network density of black gangs in Chicago is particularly intense, 30 percent compared to 4.5 percent for Latino gangs…

And a place to start for gathering more data—as Papachristos points out, his analysis is limited to people doing bad things. Robert Sampson, the Harvard (by way of Chicago) sociologist, has done pioneering work, most recently in his book Great American City, showing how positive social networks reduce crime and improve public-health outcomes in socially-organized neighborhoods like Chatham. Another possible implication is figuring out what kinds of networks “inoculate” people from violence.

Looks like a good summary of some interesting research. On one hand, this should be reassuring to the public: the perception is that crime rates in Chicago are out of control (even as they have declined in Chicago over the years and in many American cities) yet much of the violent crime is in the hands of a relatively small group of people. On the other hand, the density of violence in Chicago suggests there are some serious issues in particular social interactions and locations that are not easy to solve.

I’m also reminded of the work of sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh who has argued in several books that gangs in Chicago as well as more informal black market networks might be considered “efficient” or “rational” in what they do because of a lack of legitimate opportunities in poor neighborhoods. Whereas legal businesses might seek the best way to make profits, social networks in disadvantaged neighborhoods make do with what they have, even if the means are not legitimate. This doesn’t condone violence or other illegal behavior but Venkatesh’s work shows these aren’t haphazard or chaotic social networks and interactions.

“Gated communities for the rich and poor”

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A sociologist who has studied gated communities in Puerto Rico discusses gated communities across the socioeconomic spectrum:

The concentration of class and racial privilege in suburbs, fortressed enclaves, securitized buildings, and private islands takes place alongside the spatial concentration of poverty in ghettos, favelas, and barrios. Residential gates for the rich have also led to the rise of gates for the poor—in favelas in Brazil, South African townships, peripheral urban migrant settlements in China, and even in some public housing developments in the United States. The built environment sorts and segregates people, physically and symbolically distinguishing communities from one another. Whether one is locked inside or kept outside is determined by one’s race, class, and gender. In both kinds of gated communities, controlled access points restrict movement in and out. However, living in gated communities of the rich and poor are vastly different experiences.

The privileged gates of Extensión Alhambra offer a retreat into a secure, idyllic community; newly privatized street and sidewalks are restricted to sanctioned, paying community members, who can decide who is allowed inside. In the impoverished community of Dr. Pila, in contrast, government and private overseers control the movement of residents. So while the gates of Extensión Alhambra permit their affluent residents to exert greater political and social influence over their home turf, in Dr. Pila they have the opposite effect, diminishing residents’ power. In privileged communities, gates lock undesirables out; in poor communities, they lock them in. In both cases, gates are erected to serve the interest of the upper classes, who are primarily white. In other words, gates reproduce inequality, and cement or—to use Michel DeCerteau’s term—“politically freeze” social distinctions of race and class.

The same types of structures, different purposes and consequences. This reminds me of the debate regarding the design of public housing projects in the United States: if high-rises hadn’t been the primary choice and public housing agencies instead went with low-rise buildings or New Urbanist type structures, perhaps major problem would not have developed. But, in the case of public housing and gated communities, they can exacerbate existing issues but it is more difficult to claim they cause the issues in the first place.

What foreign governments say to warn their citizens about Chicago and other big American cities

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Here is a brief look at what some other countries say about American big cities in order to warn travelers:

Well, just as State warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the U.S. France, in particular, warns travelers to be careful in a large number of specific cities…

Chicago: Stay away from the West Side and anywhere south of 59th Street…

Boston: Avoid walking at night in Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury, and be wary of “petty crime” in Chinatown, the North End and Fenway.

New York: Be wary in Times Square and at the Statue of Liberty, and don’t go to Harlem, the Bronx or Central Park at night.

Washington: Northeast and Southeast should be avoided, and Union Station is dangerous at night. “Le quartier Anacostia n’est pas recommandable de jour comme de nuit.” Translation: Don’t go to Anacostia, day or night.

Interesting instructions that seem to be based around avoiding poorer or higher-crime areas of big cities. Perhaps the better question is how many Americans would give the same instructions to family members or friends.

Urban quiz: identify the city solely by its Starbucks locations

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See the Starbucks locations and identify the major city.

The quiz suggests you can see the rough outline of the city but this isn’t quite the case. It is probably more accurate to say that you can name the city from the higher-income neighborhoods where Starbucks are located (or not seeing the lower-income neighborhoods on the map). For example, look at the map of Chicago and the relative lack of locations on the west and south sides:

StarbucksinChicago

In other words, Starbucks acts as a proxy for other important factors in cities.

Comparing maps of urban poverty from 1980 and 2010

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These new maps of urban poverty show how poverty has changed in the last thirty years:

Poverty in the United States doesn’t look like it did just a few decades ago. In many metro areas, it touches more people today than in 1980. The demographics have changed too, with new and expanding communities of the Hispanic poor in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas. And the geography has shifted – as we’ve previously written, following the work of Brookings Institution researchers Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone, poverty now stretches well into the suburbs…

In some cities, like Milwaukee, it remains racially segregated, with the black poor living in one part of town, the white poor in another, and the Hispanic and Asian poor in separate pockets. In other cities, like Houston, racially diverse families living under the poverty line appear to share some of the same neighborhoods…

All of these pictures underscore why policy solutions created to address poverty years ago may not be well suited to the task today.

Research on urban poverty in the 1980s was largely focused on poor, black neighborhoods. This was the era of work by sociologists like William Julius Wilson, Paul Jargowsky, Doug Massey and Nancy Denton, and others who turned their attention to hyperconcentrated poverty which was largely ignored by the public and policymakers. As these maps illustrate, poverty today is much more complex involving different groups in new locations. In other words, our public understanding of urban poverty needs updating and needs to be able to tackle more variability.

Poor Chicago neighborhoods have fewer businesses compared to the average American poor neighborhood

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Chicago’s poor neighborhoods aren’t just lacking businesses. These Chicago neighborhoods have significantly lower numbers of businesses compared to poor neighborhoods in other American cities.

Translated: that means Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods are tremendously business-poor, even compared to other cities’ poorest neighborhoods. As the author, Marco Luis Small, puts it: “In some cases, the difference is stark. Chicago has 82% fewer small restaurants, 95% fewer small banks, and 72% fewer small convenience stores than a black poor ghetto in the average city…. The average black poor neighborhood in the U.S. does not look at all like the South Side of Chicago.”

The effects go beyond mere economic loss. In Heat Wave, Eric Klinenberg notes the differences between North and South Lawndale and their effects on the death rate during the 1995 heat wave:

“In North Lawndale, the dangerous ecology of abandoned buildings, open spaces, commercial depletion, violent crime, degraded infrastructure, low population density, and family dispersion undermines the viability of public life and the strength of local support systems,” he writes. “In Little Village, though, the busy streets, heavy commercial activity, residential concentration, and relatively low crime promote social contact, collective life, and public engagement in general and provide particular benefits for the elderly, who are more likely to leave home when they are drawn out by nearby amenities.”…

What struck Small when he moved to Chicago was this absence of activity—compared to, say, Harlem, which is poor but tremendously vibrant: “What I first noticed, and what took me months to get used to, was the utter lack of density, the surprising preponderance of empty spaces, vacant lots, and desolate streets, even as late as 2006. Repeatedly, I asked myself, where is everyone?”

This is part of Chicago’s exceptionalism: gleaming downtown and struggling poor neighborhoods amidst residential segregation (as discussed by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in American Apartheid and others). One strange aspect of all of this is the lack of conversation within the Chicago area itself about these disparities. Plenty of people are willing to discuss murders and crime rates. But, while sociologists like Mario Luis Small, Sudhir Venkatesh, Robert Sampson, Eric Klinenberg, and others have provided clear data about the lack of economic opportunities (as well as other kinds of opportunities) in poor Chicago neighborhoods, this is rarely discussed in public.

Rioting in the Swedish suburbs

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Youths are rioting in the Swedish suburbs after a recent violent incident involving police:

Hundreds of youths burnt down a restaurant, set fire to more than 30 cars and attacked police during a fourth night of rioting in the suburbs of Stockholm, shocking a country that dodged the worst of the financial crisis but failed to solve youth unemployment and resentment among asylum seekers.

Violence spread across the Swedish capital on Wednesday, as large numbers of young people rampaged through the suburbs, throwing stones, breaking windows and destroying cars. Police in the southern city of Malmo said two cars had been set ablaze…

The disturbances appear to have been sparked by the police killing a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in the suburb of Husby earlier this month, which prompted accusations of police brutality. The riots then spread to other poor Stockholm suburbs.

“We see a society that is becoming increasingly divided and where the gaps, both socially and economically, are becoming larger,” said Rami Al-khamisi, co-founder of Megafonen, a group that works for social change in the suburbs. “And the people out here are being hit the hardest … we have institutional racism.”

This sounds very similar to the context of the London riots a few years ago: the police are involved in a death and local residents respond in rioting while charging that this is part of a long line of negative actions taken by the police and government. However, we wouldn’t want to “commit sociology” by trying to explain such actions, would we?

This is a reminder of the state of some European suburbs where immigrants and lower-class residents live in run-down neighborhoods isolated from the native European society and opportunities for jobs and education. This is a different geography compared to the United States where rioting is linked to poor inner-city neighborhoods. But, the situations are alike: there is long-standing isolation, negative treatment from the government and police, and not much of a pathway to achieving the “good life” in society.

New analysis shows more poor people in suburbs than cities

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Several Brookings Institution scholars released new analyses showing more poor people now live in suburbs than cities:

As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 — a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book published today. Suburbs still have a smaller percentage of their population living in poverty than cities do, but the sheer number of poor people scattered in the suburbs has jumped beyond that of cities.

In the Chicago area, the number of poor in the suburbs increased by 99 percent in the last decade, from 363,966 to 724,233…

More poor people moved to the suburbs, pulled by more affordable homes or pushed by urban gentrification, the authors said. Some used the increased mobility of housing vouchers, which used to be restricted by area, to seek better schools and safer neighborhoods in suburbia. Still others, including immigrants, followed jobs as the booming suburbs demanded more workers, many for low-paying, service-sector jobs.

Change also came from within. More people in the suburbs slipped into poverty as manufacturing jobs disappeared, the authors found. The housing boom and bust also walloped many homeowners on the outer ridges of metropolitan areas, hitting pocketbooks hard. On top of that, the booming numbers of poor people in the suburbs were driven, in part, by the exploding growth of the suburbs themselves.

The shift caught many communities by surprise, the authors found, with public and private agencies unprepared to meet the need in suburban areas.

 

This analysis is part of a new took titled Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.

This is not new for those who follow suburban trends: the suburban population has become increasingly diverse in terms of social class in recent decades. In fact, there have always been pockets of working-class residents in suburbs since suburbs began in the United States. However, there is a longstanding image of suburbs as mainly wealthy places as those with means left cities.

One other thought: even with the increasing number of poor people in the suburbs as a whole, poorer residents are not likely scattered evenly throughout suburban regions. Take the Chicago area for example: how many poor residents are in places like Kenilworth or Barrington or Lake Forest or Oak Brook versus places like Harvey, Addison, Waukegan, and Elgin? Some of the residential patterns of social class in suburbs then mirror some of the issues American cities have faced for decades, poorer areas isolated from wealthier areas, but with a twist: while all of these city neighborhoods may be under one government, suburbs have varying layers of government, making it more difficult to provide services to pockets of poorer residents. Additionally, wealthier suburbs have effectively limited affordable housing in many of their communities, restricting where poorer suburban residents can live and find opportunities.