Tag Archives: poor neighborhoods

The difference in tree cover between poorer and wealthier neighborhoods

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One recent newspaper analysis and a new academic study both agree: tree cover differs between richer and poorer urban neighborhoods.

Last month, the Washington Post conducted its own study of the city’s tree canopy, with some findings that may not surprise anyone who lives in the capital: Lower-income neighborhoods were substantially less likely to have trees, with the city’s densest greenery clustered west of the 16th Street Northwest fault line that divides some of Washington’s wealthiest neighborhoods from the rest of town. Tree density in Washington, in short, provides a kind of proxy for wealth (and if you’ve spent time in Washington, you also know that wealth is a proxy for race).

Lest other cities scoff at Washington’s arbor-inequality, research just published online in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives confirms that a very similar pattern appears all across the country. Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley looked at 63,436 census block groups from across the country covering 304 metropolitan areas and more than 81 million people. And they identified those blocks most at risk in extreme heat waves thanks to the lack of tree cover or the presence of too much asphalt (or impervious surfaces). Both of these factors have been shown to exacerbate the urban heat island effect, raising surface temperatures, suggesting that people who live in these neighborhoods may be at the highest heat risk as temperatures warm with climate change.

According to the findings, blacks were 52 percent more likely than whites to live in such neighborhoods, Asians 32 percent more likely, and Hispanics 21 percent more likely (controlling for factors that explain variation in tree growth, like climate and rainfall).

“It’s in the same range of elevated risk that we see for a number of environmental concerns,” says Bill Jesdale, one of the authors, referring to similar findings in the environmental justice literature that show minorities living in communities with greater exposure to traffic, pollution and other environmental hazards. “Often, unfortunately, you see relative risks that are quite a bit higher than that.”

Interesting findings. Trees might seem rather basic, even in cities, until such differences are pointed out.

So, what is behind these differences in tree cover? Are cities planting fewer trees in poorer neighborhoods? Do poorer neighborhoods tend to have fewer parks, fewer tree-lined streets, and more manufacturing and industrial facilities? Do the residents of wealthier neighborhoods make sure that their neighborhoods have more trees? Is this primarily about trees themselves or is this just part of a larger package of fewer amenities in poorer neighborhoods?

Based on these findings, I wonder if we’ll see more people advocate for trees in poorer neighborhoods. Who could be against trees and more greenery, particularly if it is an issue of justice and inequality?

Differentiating between playgrounds and parks in poor versus wealthy neighborhoods

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Researchers in recent years have looked at different amenities in poor versus wealthier neighborhoods, things like pawn shops, payday loan stores, and grocery stores. But what about parks and playgrounds? Here is a summary of a new study:

A recent study, published in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, looked at the amenities in 165 parks in the four-county Kansas City metro region. Low-income neighborhoods actually had more parks per capita (perhaps a result, the authors suggest, of the fact that minority communities in the area are largely located in the older urban core where more parks were once planned into the city’s layout). Parks in predominantly minority communities were also more likely to have basketball courts.

But the researchers also found that these same parks were less likely to have aesthetic features like decorative landscaping, trails and playgrounds. As the authors explain:

These findings are problematic because playgrounds have been shown to promote increased [physical activity] intensity and healthier weight status among children. Areas of low [socioeconomic status] are perhaps the neighborhoods that need playgrounds the most due to the increased likelihood of those areas having a higher prevalence of youth who are overweight or obese.

These findings also suggest one simple strategy (among many needed) to address health disparities in low-income communities in any city: Make sure public parks seem like places a 7-year-old would actually want to spend the day.

Parks are complex spaces. Jane Jacobs discusses them in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and suggests they aren’t necessarily good – like other areas of a neighborhood, they require care and benefit from a mix of uses and people on surrounding streets. Parks can be planned for but also require physical and social maintenance.

I was reminded again of some of these different amenities in a recent visit to a community gym in a nearby community. It was a busy weekday evening with a variety of activities taking place: the large room with aerobic and weight equipment was packed, the gym with gymnastics had a small class in there, and then there was another larger gym space. It was an open night for basketball with two possible courts. However, one court was being used for about 10 ping-pong tables and the other for basketball. In other words, how much are park amenities, like basketball courts or hiking trails, tied to the race and class status of the neighborhood?

William Julius Wilson on what has changed in the 25 years since “The Truly Disadvantaged” was published

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William Julius Wilson offers some thoughts on what has changed since his book The Truly Disadvantaged was published in 1987:

It doesn’t do any good to offer some people a job if their values don’t lead them to take it. That concerns Wilson, too. At the conference, he and other policy experts explored the importance of “neighborhood effects” that can undermine values and incentives to, for example, pack up and move to where jobs might be more available.

Wilson credited welfare reform and the robust economy of the 1990s with reducing underclass poverty, but noted that poverty has rebounded since 2000. The dip in the 1990s might prove to be only a “blip” in the long-term decline of concentrated poverty communities, he said.

Black prison incarceration also has increased, putting even more of a chill on black incomes, family life and marriageable men.

“Quite frankly I think that (President Barack) Obama’s programs have prevented poverty, including concentrated poverty, from rapidly rising, considering the terrible economy,” Wilson said. He included Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which earmarked $80 billion for low-income Americans. It included such emergency benefits as an extension of unemployment benefits, a temporary increase in the earned income tax credit and additional funds for food stamps. It also offered $4 billion in job-training and workforce enhancement programs and $2 billion for neighborhood stabilization efforts, Wilson noted.

Based on what Clarence Page reports here, perhaps not a whole lot has changed? It doesn’t seem that poverty or inner-city neighborhoods have really been a major priority of any major political candidate…

Moving poor families to better neighborhoods doesn’t improve jobs, education but does boost happiness

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A new study suggests happiness is one of the primary benefits of poor families moving to better neighborhoods:

When thousands of poor families were given federal housing subsidies in the early 1990s to move out of impoverished neighborhoods, social scientists expected the experience of living in more prosperous communities would pay off in better jobs, higher incomes and more education.

That did not happen. But more than 10 years later, the families’ lives had improved in another way: They reported being much happier than a comparison group of poor families who were not offered subsidies to move, a finding that was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

And using the gold standard of social surveys — the General Social Survey, in which researchers have questioned thousands of Americans of all income levels going back to the 1970s — researchers even quantified how much happier the families were. The improvement was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more a year, said Jens Ludwig, a professor of public policy at the University of Chicago and the lead author of the study…

“Mental health and subjective well-being are very important,” said William Julius Wilson, a sociology professor at Harvard whose 1987 book “The Truly Disadvantaged” pioneered theory about concentrated poverty. “If you are not feeling well, it’s going to affect everything — your employment, relations with your family.”

This seems to fit with findings from other studies looking at programs like the Gautreaux Program in Chicago or the Moving to Opportunity program that took place in a few big cities. The children of these movers/participants may have better jobs, incomes, and educations down the road but there is not much of an immediate payoff in these areas.

It is too bad Wilson doesn’t go further with his comments. What exactly does better well-being translate into? Improved or more stable family life? Better social relations? Could improved well-being translate into better jobs and higher education down the road?

Your future GPS to have an “avoid ghetto” option?

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Here is some interesting news out of the world of GPS patents:

Microsoft has been granted a patent for its “avoid ghetto” feature for GPS devices.

A GPS device is used to find shortcuts and avoid traffic, but Microsoft’s patent states that a route can be plotted for pedestrians to avoid an “unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures.”

Created for mobile phones, the technology uses the latest crime statistics and weather data and includes them when calculating a route.

The patent, written in a combination of tech-speak and legalese, was awarded to Microsoft earlier this week. It also described other uses for the new GPS technology.

I wonder how exactly they will define an “unsafe neighborhood.” Even with access to crime statistics, it sounds like they will have to draw a cutoff line to distinguish between safe and unsafe areas. Where exactly is this line or is usually more about perceptions about which neighborhoods are unsafe in day-to-day life? “Ghetto” itself is a loaded term involving race and class and I’m sure there will come up in discussions of this new GPS feature.

I know companies are looking for advantages but is there a big need for this sort of information? Are people clamoring for help in avoiding certain neighborhoods?

The mystery behind the dramatic drop in New York City’s crime rates

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A new book written by a criminologist examines why crime rates have dropped dramatically in New York City in the last two decades. It’s not all due to broken windows theory or Rudy Giuliani:

In the 1980s, the city was widely perceived as a pit of chaos and fear, an urban society stumbling toward anarchy. Between 1965 and 1984, the number of violent crimes nearly tripled. In 1984, there were nearly five murders a day. In the following years, things got worse still…

In his new book, “The City That Became Safe”, Franklin Zimring unrolls a litany of statistics that almost defy belief. The murder rate has dropped by 82 percent. Rapes are down 77 percent and assaults by two-thirds. Auto theft verges on extinction after dropping 94 percent…

So what accounts for the miracle? Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California at Berkeley, surmises that the biggest factors were focusing cops on high-crime areas and closing down outdoor drug markets, which helped curb gang conflicts that often turned deadly (though it had little effect on drug use). But much of what happened is a mystery.

That’s the bad news, since the New York experience yields no easy formula for safe streets. But it proves we can realize vast improvements in safety without first solving all the problems that supposedly cause crime — poverty, bad schools, out-of-wedlock births, drug use, violent movies and so on.

It would then be really interesting to see what lessons Zimring says can be applied to other cities.

It does seem worthwhile to conclude that this is a hopeful tale: crime rates can truly be reduced. We may not know exactly what to do but crime can be curbed. Yet, I don’t think it would be good if we then didn’t  pay attention to these other issues like a lack of opportunities and poverty. Imagine a world where poor neighborhoods have lower crime rates, perhaps not as low as wealthy suburban communities but lower than peak rates several decades ago. Would other problems receive as much media attention if crime stories couldn’t lead the local news? Do these issues simply fall more off the map than they already are within public and political discourse?

Census data shows increase in people living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty

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New Census data shows that the population of the “poorest poor” in America has grown (about 20.5 million Americans), particularly in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty:

After declining during the 1990s economic boom, the proportion of poor people in large metropolitan areas who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods jumped from 11.2 percent in 2000 to 15.1 percent last year, according to a Brookings Institution analysis released Thursday. Such geographically concentrated poverty in the U.S. is now at the highest since 1990, following a decade of high unemployment and rising energy costs.

Extreme poverty today continues to be prevalent in the industrial Midwest, including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Mich., and Akron, Ohio, due to a renewed decline in manufacturing. But the biggest growth in high-poverty areas is occurring in newer Sun Belt metro areas such as Las Vegas, Riverside, Calif., and Cape Coral, Fla., after the plummeting housing market wiped out home values and dried up construction jobs.

As a whole, the number of poor in the suburbs who lived in high-poverty neighborhoods rose by 41 percent since 2000, more than double the growth of such city neighborhoods.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior research associate at Brookings, described a demographic shift in people living in high-poverty neighborhoods, which have less access to good schools, hospitals and government services. As concentrated poverty spreads to new areas, including suburbs, the residents are now more likely to be white, native-born and high school or college graduates — not the conventional image of high-school dropouts or single mothers in inner-city ghettos.

Two things to note: the percentage of people living in poverty concentrated areas is back at 1990 levels and these areas themselves have shifted to new places like the suburbs and the Sun Belt. Are we any better off in addressing this issue than we were when scholars called attention to this like William Julius Wilson in the 1980s and Paul Jargowsky in the 1990s?

It is interesting that there is very little in current political or cultural discourse about the “poorest poor” as most of the current talk centers on the middle class or perhaps the working class. Even Occupy Wall Street seems to be about the middle and working classes. Perhaps much of this group’s anger is driven by the middle-class who now feels the pinch of the economic crisis but the “poorest poor” have been dealing with similar and/or worse concerns for decades.

Does the failure of urban renewal necessarily mean that the free market could solve the problems of poor neighborhoods?

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Reason looks at what happened to one New York City neighborhood in the name of urban renewal:

In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life. One of the Housing Act’s main initiatives – “urban renewal” –  destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and ’60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes. Overall, about half of urban renewal’s victims were black, a reality that led to James Baldwin’s famous quip that “urban renewal means Negro removal.”

New York City’s Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: With little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years.

The community destroyed at Manhattantown was a model for the tight-knit, interconnected neighborhoods later celebrated by Jane Jacobs and other critics of top-down redevelopment. In the early 20th century, Manhattantown was briefly the center of New York’s black music scene. A startling roster of musicians, writers, and artists resided there: the composer Will Marion Cook, vaudeville star Bert Williams, opera singer Abbie Mitchell, James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond, muralist Charles Alston, writer and historian Arturo Schomburg, Billie Holiday (whose mother also owned a restaurant on 99th Street), Butterfly McQueen of “Gone with the Wind” fame, and the actor Robert Earl Jones.

Designating West 99th and 98th Streets a “slum” was bitterly ironic. The community was founded when the great black real estate entrepreneur Philip Payton Jr. broke the color line on 99th Street in 1905. Payton, also credited with first bringing African Americans to Harlem, wanted to make it possible for a black man to rent an apartment, in his words, “wherever his means will permit him to live.”

While Reason is a conservative website, there are plenty of others on the other side of the political aisle that also agree that urban renewal had a negative impact on many neighborhoods. Ultimately, this policy was used to clear “slums” and to use that land for more profitable development, typically for wealthier residents and businesses. Additionally, what actually counted as “blight” or as a “slum” was contentious as it tended to frown upon cheaper, ethnic or non-white neighborhoods. Blacks weren’t the only ones displaced; Herbert Gan’s classic work Urban Villagers looked at the fate of an Italian-American neighborhood which was ripped apart by urban renewal.

Since this comes from Reason, I assume that this is a critique of liberal policy and of eminent domain: you can’t trust the government with these kinds of powers as they will use it to trample people they don’t like. But can we swing all the way in the opposite direction and suggest that the free market will eventually get rid of the issues that poorer neighborhoods face and that lead them to be ripe for urban renewal?

I would argue no. Left to its own devices, the free market can also result in harmful policies that hurt less than wealthy neighborhoods. Here are a few examples:

1. Redlining. This was based on the practice of marking urban neighborhoods in terms of the security of their real estate by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation which arose out of the New Deal. But this practice really took off when private lenders and institutions adopted the government agency’s markings and then only made loans to the better neighborhoods, effectively shutting out poor neighborhoods from mortgages.

2. Exclusionary zoning. After the Fair Housing Act of 1968 ruled out discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, exclusionary zoning became a hot topic in the 1970s. A number of court cases looked at how the zoning guidelines of communities and counties effectively kept poor people out of suburban locations. By only allowing higher priced housing or certain kinds of housing (like single-family homes on a minimum of 2 acres), these zoning guidelines were very effective in maintaining the exclusivity of certain areas.

3. Still existing discrimination in obtaining mortgages and other loans. There have been plenty of studies that show when equally matched whites and blacks apply for a mortgage or a car loan or another loan, blacks are rejected at higher rates. Similar research has shown this also applies to jobs. Read an overview of this research in a 2008 Annual Review of Sociology article.

4. The ongoing presence of residential segregation in the United States. Many of our major cities, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are still very segregated. View maps of some of these cities here.

5. Gentrification. While the influx of residents may “improve” a neighborhood, it often has the effect of pushing the poorer residents into other poor neighborhoods because of increased housing prices and property taxes.

So urban renewal was not the answer. But it is unlikely that a completely unfettered free market is as well. So perhaps the real question to address is how to craft effective public policy that provides aid to neighborhoods and their residents so that these neighborhoods truly improve, add jobs, and experience revitalization. The key here is “effective,” policy that does not become cost prohibitive, works with local residents and organizations rather than just applies a top-down approach, and achieves attainable and worthy objectives while minimizing unintended consequences. This is likely a difficult task but swinging the pendulum all the way to the free market side isn’t the solution.

“There Are No Children Here” 20 years later

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Alex Kotlowitz’s book There Are No Children Here is a modern classic that describes the life of children within some of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. Here is a little bit about the book and its aftermath:

“I’ve never thought about it being (a statement) about public housing,” Kotlowitz said while sitting in a cafe Friday near his home. “It could have taken place in any inner-city neighborhood.”…

Public housing now in Chicago is “not perfect, but it’s quite different from when we first started,” Popkin said, citing the transformation at Horner, the CHA’s commitment to resident services and the way that the agency is managed.

But many things remain the same. The poor are still extremely segregated, Kotlowitz said. Deadly violence still defines impoverished communities where rampant shootings are committed by a new generation of so-called cliques…

The brothers [Lafeyette and Pharoah Walton], now 36 and 33, have dealt with their share of adversity. They have both served time in prison and continue to struggle with poverty.

As Sue Popkin suggests, the book helped humanize the problems these children face. It is one thing to have stereotypes and broad ideas about what happens in poorer neighborhoods but another thing to get to know and start rooting for children who live there.

On the whole, it sounds like there is still a lot of work to do regarding public housing, poor neighborhoods, and helping children in these neighborhoods obtain a good education and reach a middle-class lifestyle. Would another, similar book help in this cause? These concerns rarely bubble up to the top of American public discussions.

Quick Review: More than Just Race

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This book, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, is the latest monograph by William Julius Wilson. I read this several months ago and haven’t reviewed it yet because I have been thinking about its approach and conclusions. Here is my quick take:

I am still not quite sure to make of this book. I ultimately think that it is too short and doesn’t spend upon time seriously doing what Wilson claims he wants to do: explore how structure and culture interact and affect poor inner-city neighborhoods. The book is written in a series that seems to be for a popular audience and it seems that Wilson is just limited in space and perhaps how academic the work can be and the number of studies he can cite. Additionally, although Wilson cites some interesting recent research (including Move To Opportunity research) involving cultural values, Wilson still sides with structure (his primary research focus for years) in the end though he suggests culture plays some role.

I contrast this book with what I heard at a culture and poverty panel at the American Sociological Association meetings in August in Atlanta. I felt that panel took culture much more seriously – indeed, several of the scholars were sociologists of culture who are trying to bring this growing subfield to a point where it can be recognized as having something important to add to discussions about poverty. This discussion featured some research in progress but these scholars seemed to put structure and culture on a more equal footing.

Of course, this is an emerging field of work. After research in the 1960s from people like Daniel Moynihan and Oscar Lewis were said to be “blaming the victim” when discussing culture and the role of values and norms in poor neighborhoods, structure was the primary focus for several decades when studying poverty. Wilson’s book may serve as an entry point or guide to the discussion of culture and poverty but those who seriously want to delve into the issues will need to look into other works.

(I might also quibble with Wilson’s definition of culture, the collection of values, norms, behaviors, traditions, etc. of a group. This leaves culture as a more passive phenomenon. I would prefer to use this definition when thinking about the sociology of culture: “processes of meaning-making.”)