Tag Archives: poverty

How a suburban school district could “attract the right families…while keeping the wrong families out”

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The suburban case studies in the 2024 book Disillusioned include one wealthier community trying to boost its status and avoid decline. Here is one way they tried to insure this in their local schools:

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For the plan to work, the district would have to attract the right families into Lovejoy while keeping the wrong families out. Hoping to gauge the possibility of threading that needle, the Lovejoy board hired a demographic firm to run some analyses. First, they took aerial photographs of the district’s 17-square-mile attendance zone, counting the number of roofs versus available lots to ascertain likely development trends. Then, the firm analyzed census data and conducted interviews with local real estate agents, landowners, and developers to predict the household incomes and education levels of future residents. In their final report, the demographers projected that Lovejoy’s enrollment would by 8 or 9 percent a year for the next decade, enough to support a midsize high school. And just as important, they expected that the local poverty rate would remain extremely low, allowing the towns to maintain what local leaders liked to call “quality growth.” Elated, Lovejoy leaders began assuring prospective homeowners that their new high school would never look anything like its gargantuan counterpart in Allen. (202-203)

Growth is good in suburbs as it brings status and additional revenue.

But suburban communities often are looking for particular kinds of growth and certain residents. Here, “quality growth” means higher-income residents in larger new houses. The community does not want residents who are below the poverty line. And they then can run particular programs in their local schools aimed at high levels of academic performance, which will also boost their status. Good schools are not just about student learning; for numerous suburbanites, they serve as proxies for the overall quality of life.

Through planning and zoning, the suburb will have effectively decided who will live in the community and attend the local schools. They may pay for this down the road – the argument of the book is that the suburbs are a Ponzi scheme that pass along the costs to future residents who have fewer resources to meet the costs – but the short-term benefits look good for local leaders and residents.

Food insecurity in the suburban land of plenty

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If the suburbs are supposedly the realization of the American Dream, why are at least a few suburban residents short on food?

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Visits to suburban food pantries have surged over the past two years, exceeding previous record highs set during the pandemic.

Schaumburg Township’s pantry experienced 33.3% increase in client visits between the fiscal year that ended in February 2023 and the one that ended in February 2024, from 9,809 visits to 13,079…

The Greater Chicago Food Depository, which supplies more than 800 food pantries in Cook County, has seen similar growth in most suburban areas, Communications Director Man-Yee Lee said.

Such numbers hint at the growth of complex suburbia where more suburban residents experience poverty or have lower incomes. Schaumburg Township overall might have a relatively high household median income – $83,909 in the 2020 Census – but that obscures that there are many households with less. With higher housing costs and food prices, the need for food goes up.

I would be interested in hearing more about coordinated efforts to address food insecurity in suburbs. I am sure there are a good number of food pantries, whether provided by local government bodies, local congregations, or other groups. But, this can provide a hodge podge of opportunities that are available at different times and places. Are there regional efforts to address food issues? Is this an issue that might be reduced significantly with higher-paying jobs? Would more affordable housing make it easier to obtain food?

Small basic income programs all across the United States

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Over 150 communities in the United States have had or are piloting basic income programs:

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Cash aid without conditions was considered a radical idea before the pandemic. But early results from a program in Stockton, Calif., showed promise. Then interest exploded after it became clear how much COVID stimulus checks and emergency rental payments had helped people. The U.S. Census Bureau found that an expanded child tax credit cut child poverty in half. That is, until the expansion ended and child poverty spiked.

Around the country, from big cities to rural counties, there’ve been more than 150 basic income pilots, and counting. Supporters say it works because people can spend the money on whatever they need most…

The pandemic also spurred cash aid because cities got their own pot of COVID relief money. Many are using that to fund guaranteed income pilots. Philanthropic donations are another major funding source, including from groups that have long organized direct cash payments to combat poverty in developing nations.

The pilots target low- to moderate-income people, from a few hundred to a few thousand households, and generally pay them $500 or $1,000 a month for a year or two.

Here is one way to think about such programs: the United States often focuses on helping people or social actors reach their top potential. Whether in education or in innovation, why not enable the top performers to be even better performers? But, another way to operate is to help raise the floor in areas like income so fewer people struggle. These programs seek to provide monies so that people with less income have more opportunities.

One recent headline about these programs noted the $125 million devoted to them. This is just a drop in the bucket compared to the income of the whole United States or even in these locales.

Given the outcomes of these programs plus some of the outcomes of the COVID-19 aid, my guess is that we will see more of this with hopefully positive outcomes for people and communities.

Universal basic income pilot programs in multiple US cities – and could they work in more places?

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A look at multiple small universal basic income programs suggests they are effective in a number of big cities:

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Pilot programs have sprung up across the country, from liberal strongholds such as Los Angeles and Baltimore to more centrist and conservative cities like Columbia, South Carolina; Birmingham, Alabama; and Gainesville, Florida. Just Income, the Florida program, also focused its stipends on formerly incarcerated individuals, with a rationale similar to Middleton’s. “It costs Floridians about $28,000 a year to hold someone in prison,” the director of the Gainesville program said in a press release earlier this year. “Alternatively, we’re investing just $7,600 directly to one of our valued neighbors, giving them a vital income floor.” In city after city and cohort after cohort — old, young, single parents, ex-convicts — universal basic income has improved health outcomes, raised employment, and bolstered childcare opportunities (and recipients have had consistently better outcomes than control groups).

According to Jefferson, guaranteed income — which she calls “unrestricted cash transfers” — impacts recipients’ lives almost immediately. Early results from her firm’s analysis, she said, “really show that cash can improve people’s financial stress and mental health remarkably and quickly.”

With more data at hand than theoretical projection, the evidence is overwhelming: Universal basic income is working nearly universally.

This article seems more interested in the political aspects of such programs working in both Democratic and Republican states and then wondering if there is political appetite for larger-scale programs.

I am interested in the place-based aspects of these programs. Does success across a range of cities mean that it could or should work in all American cities? Some programs or contexts might lead to particular successes or difficulties. Is there a model or two that can be emulated or do programs need to be tweaked?

Is the success limited to cities or would similar programs in metropolitan regions or rural areas get similar results? Disadvantage and lack of resources can be found across American contexts.

If places do not matter as much regarding effectiveness, does that mean a federal program would be more effective? Or, if there are local contexts that matter, could the federal government provide monies to states or municipalities to distribute?

It would also be interesting to see a timeline across different locations of when larger programs might roll out.

The role of land in new rankings of the most disadvantaged and advantaged places in the United States

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A new analysis ranks the most disadvantaged and advantaged places and one common factor is land and property ownership:

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Immediately, the rankings revealed a stark geographical pattern. The first surprise—especially for professors who have spent our careers studying urban poverty—was that the most disadvantaged places on our index were primarily rural. But they didn’t fit the stereotypical image of rural America. Though some of these were majority white, most were majority Black or Hispanic. We could see, too, that many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation. Considerable poverty exists in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked among even the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation. The only cities on that list were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester…

The places that our index identified as the 200 most disadvantaged are concentrated in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt. (Not one county in the West, apart from those with disproportionately large Native American communities, showed up on the list.) These places share a history of intensive resource extraction and human exploitation not seen to the same degree elsewhere in the United States. In each place, this economic pattern emerged (or, in the case of the Cotton Belt, fully flourished) in the late 19th or early 20th century. In each place, one industry came to dominate the economy, a pattern that held, broadly, until the 1960s, when King Cotton, King Tobacco, King Coal, and South Texas agriculture, would bow to the twin forces of automation and global competition…

Exploring the other end of our Index of Deep Disadvantage—the places identified as those of greatest advantage—was also vital to our research. Once again, we were surprised by where the index took us. It was not Manhattan or tech-rich Seattle. Instead, the list pointed us to the upper Midwest: Minnesota, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa. Overall, poverty rates in these places are very low, babies are born healthy, people live to a ripe old age, and a low-income child usually has a similar chance of making it into the middle class as any other kid.

Counties that rank among those of greatest advantage began as agricultural communities with modestly sized farms, many originally secured through the 1862 Homestead Act that made landownership widely available. Many of these places have built on this history of broad-based wealth by making significant investments in schools, which has contributed to high graduation and college enrollment rates over generations. Using the best data available, we found that they have enjoyed the lowest rates of violent crime, income inequality, and public corruption in the nation. These counties are unusually rich in social capital: Residents are connected to one another through volunteerism, membership in civic organizations, and participation in other community activities.

Who owns land? Who benefits from working it? It sounds like the Upper Midwest offered more opportunities for settlers to purchase land and develop wealth over the long run. In contrast, the three areas of disadvantage identified had more disparities in land ownership versus who worked the land. Additionally, Native Americans were removed from land that offered opportunities.

Approaches to addressing inequality and poverty in the United States can often involve homeownership but less discussed is land. A house is often tied to a particular property that has its own value. The land identified in the rankings above were particularly important for subsistence. This is not so much the case with urban and suburban land today where the proximity of the land to amenities and the size of the lot matter more than the owner’s ability to live off of it.

The rankings above also hint at the long-term consequences of land ownership. Who can access and own land now will matter for decades, possibly centuries.

Of Chicago region residents in poverty, 54% are suburbanites

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One of the leading researchers on suburban poverty recently presented updated data about the Chicago region:

More than half the Chicago region’s low-income population — 54 percent — lived in the suburbs in 2017 — up from 39 percent in 2000.

Poverty can vary quite a bit from Chicago suburb to suburb:

The average poverty rate for the Northwest suburbs is about 8 percent. Poverty rates have grown unevenly across the region — about 17 percent in Carpentersville, roughly 15 percent in Elgin, 11 percent in Hanover Park and Wheeling, about 10 percent in Palatine and Prospect Heights and 6 percent in Schaumburg.

These are significant changes and differences. The future of many suburban communities may just depend on how they respond.

Researchers say half the world is middle class or higher

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A new report suggests a majority of humans are middle class or above:

For the first time since agriculture-based civilization began 10,000 years ago, the majority of humankind is no longer poor or vulnerable to falling into poverty. By our calculations, as of this month, just over 50 percent of the world’s population, or some 3.8 billion people, live in households with enough discretionary expenditure to be considered “middle class” or “rich.” About the same number of people are living in households that are poor or vulnerable to poverty. So September 2018 marks a global tipping point. After this, for the first time ever, the poor and vulnerable will no longer be a majority in the world. Barring some unfortunate global economic setback, this marks the start of a new era of a middle-class majority.

We make these claims based on a classification of households into those in extreme poverty (households spending below $1.90 per person per day) and those in the middle class (households spending $11-110 per day per person in 2011 purchasing power parity, or PPP). Two other groups round out our classification: vulnerable households fall between those in poverty and the middle class; and those who are at the top of the distribution who are classified as “rich.”

The consequences could be interesting:

Why does it matter that a middle-class tipping point has been reached and that the middle class is the most rapidly growing segment of the global income distribution? Because the middle class drive demand in the global economy and because the middle class are far more demanding of their governments…

In most countries, there is a clear relationship between the fate of the middle class and the happiness of the population. According to the Gallup World Poll, new entrants into the middle class are noticeably happier than those stuck in poverty or in vulnerable households. Conversely, individuals in countries where the middle class is shrinking report greater degrees of personal stress. The middle class also puts pressure on governments to perform better. They look to their governments to provide affordable housing, education, and universal health care. They rely on public safety nets to help them in sickness, unemployment or old age. But they resist efforts of governments to impose taxes to pay the bills. This complicates the politics of middle-class societies, so they range from autocratic to liberal democracies. Many advanced and middle-income countries today are struggling to find a set of politics that can satisfy a broad middle-class majority.

There are multiple issues to consider here: how all of this is measured, whether the majority is relatively evenly spread across countries or is concentrated in certain areas, and what this might bring.

But, I will point to another feature of this study: it suggests relatively good news. For much of human history, larger-scale collectives – from kingdoms to empires to countries – have consisted of some elites, perhaps a limited middle class, and a larger poor and working-class population. If these figures are true, more people have access to resources and opportunities to do things.

This would fit nicely with some materials I have heard in recent years about a good amount of good news about the global system. On one hand, there are still major problems and sizable poor and vulnerable populations (the less well-off half in this study). On the other hand, global health is improving, economic conditions on the whole are improving, violence is down (in relative terms), and people around the world may be paying attention to the plight of others like never before.

Perhaps this is why even Google has ways of providing some of good news. Even if much news revolves around problems, there is plenty of good news to find.

Poverty measure that goes beyond income or financial resources

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How exactly to define poverty  is an ongoing conversation (earlier posts here and here) and here is another proposal that would include two additional dimensions:

If the point of measuring poverty is to capture well-being, we should reframe poverty as a form of social exclusion and deprivation. “Poverty has a wider meaning than lack of income. It’s not being able to participate in things we take for granted in terms of connection to society, but also crime, and life expectancy,” argues Rank. In an era when most deaths by guns are suicides, addiction rates are rising, and U.S. life expectancy is dropping and increasingly unequal by race and education level, capturing people’s well-being and designing solutions beyond material hardship is paramount.

Both of these dimensions have grounding in sociological discussions of poverty. The difference between absolute poverty and relative poverty covers similar ground to the idea of deprivation. There may be a minimum amount of resources someone needs to survive but this is different than comparing survival to normal or regular participation in a group or society. This is particularly compounded in today’s world where it is so easy for anyone – rich or poor – to at least how how others live (though this is certainly not a new issue).

Social exclusion can be very damaging as it limits opportunities for particular groups and often prevents the ability to help shape their own lives through political or collective action. This reminds me of William Julius Wilson’s work where economic troubles lead to the social exclusion of poor neighborhoods from broader society. Other researchers, such as Mario Small in Villa Victoria, have examined this idea more closely and found that some members of poorer neighborhoods are able to develop social networks outside their neighborhood of residence but these forays do not necessarily extend advantages to the whole community.

If researchers did decide that deprivation and social exclusion should be part of poverty measures, it would be interesting to see how the measures are standardized for social science and government data.

Maybe affordable housing will be addressed when more seniors need it

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The retirement difficulties facing many American seniors includes finding decent housing:

What can be done to help today’s seniors and generations to come? There are two approaches, Prindiville says: help people save for old age and make retirement more affordable. As for the first approach, some states have been trying to establish programs that help people save for retirement through payroll deductions even if their employers don’t offer any retirement-savings accounts, for example. But the Trump administration in May repealed an Obama-era rule from the Department of Labor that would have made it easier for states to help people to set up these plans. And the federal government is winding down a program, called myRA, that tried to encourage middle- and low-income Americans to save for retirement. “There are no new initiatives or strategies coming out of the federal government at a time when the need is growing,” Prindiville said.

The second approach might mean expanding affordable housing options, creating programs to help seniors cover medical costs, and reforming the Supplemental Security Income program so that poor seniors can receive more benefits.But there does not seem to be much of an appetite for such ideas in Washington right now. In fact, the Trump administration has proposed cutting money from SSI as well as the Social Security Disability Income program.

These initiatives can make the difference between having a home—and some semblance of stability—and not. Roberta Gordon, in Corona, was barely scraping by when I talked to her. A few months later, she was much more stable. Why? She’d gotten off a wait list and been accepted into the housing-voucher program known as Section 8, which reduces the amount of income she has to put towards housing. She’s still working at 76, but she feels a little more secure now that she has more help. She knows, at least, that she’s one of the lucky ones—able, in her older years, to keep food on the table and a roof over her head.

Many Americans are opposed to helping the poor who they feel should be helping themselves. There is probably more support for providing food or temporary shelter intended to help people get through a rough patch. But, housing is something different.  Why should the government provide funds or other help in finding housing when others are working hard to rent a unit somewhere or scrap together funds to purchase a home?

But, Americans in the last century have been more willing to provide help for seniors. They have contributed to society over their lifetime. They deserve a retirement after decades of work. Society should care for the aged. This does not necessarily mean senior centers or nursing homes are welcomed everywhere; indeed, many residents do not want to live right next to one (see an example from the Chicago area). Yet, many communities also are willing to do things to help seniors stay and thus there are property tax caps or programs to help seniors pay for utilities.

Maybe this is how affordable housing will start to be addressed in many American communities: seniors will need it in the coming years and decades. Once some of this housing is present, perhaps neighbors will see it is not as bad as they feared.

Suburbs in the American west still struggling to recover

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In addition to the Rust Belt, suburbs of cities in the western United States are also finding it hard to come back after the housing bubble burst:

These towns are located in the suburbs of the American west, in regions hit hard by the housing crisis—Southern California, Las Vegas, and Arizona. Hemet, a suburb of Riverside, California, with a population of 84,000, ranked eighth on EIG’s most distressed small-and-mid-sized-cities list. In Hemet, according to the group’s report, employment fell 15.5 percent between 2011 and 2015, while it grew 9.4 percent nationwide. The number of businesses in Hemet dropped 4.8 percent over that time period. The median home price, at $237,000, is still 30 percent lower than it was in 2006.

Why hasn’t Hemet found surer footing? For one thing, the region where Hemet is located was decimated by the housing crisis, with among the highest foreclosure and unemployment rates in the nation; many families are still recovering. But Hemet’s problems are also the result of structural changes in the economy—changes that have been underway for decades but were masked by the heady days of the housing boom. Middle-class jobs have been disappearing while high-wage and low-wage jobs have grown—but in different geographic locations. High-wage jobs are often located in big cities, while low-wage jobs are in relatively cheap locations like suburbs and small cities. This dynamic changes the housing markets of these cities, too, with big cities getting more expensive as more high-wage workers migrate there, and low-wage workers leaving cities to seek more affordable housing in the far-away suburbs they can afford. Now that the dust of the recession has cleared, it is evident that the geography of poverty has changed in America. Hemet is emblematic of just how fast—and just how dramatically—this has happened…

Hemet problems are in some ways particular to the areas that suffered the most during the housing bust. Suburbs far away from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, where people bought homes during the “drive til you qualify” housing boom, were plagued by a high number of foreclosures in the bust. After the homes went through foreclosure, they were purchased by investors and rented out, creating new, low-cost rentals. Before the recession, 63 percent of homes in Hemet were owner-occupied, today just 54 percent are, according to Census data…

In the end, Hemet is stuck. The city itself can’t convince companies to pay better wages, and it has no control over the rents in big cities that are pushing people out to the suburbs. It has tried to force absentee landlords to keep up their homes, but has limited resources to do so, and struggles to smooth over its transition from a community of homeowners to one of renters. Like many other suburbs and small cities across the country, the economic tide has turned against its residents, leaving them seemingly no path back to vitality. As Hemet and many suburbs like it are finding, growing poverty can lead to even bigger problems—lower tax revenues, fewer businesses able to stay put, worse services like schools and police. This, of course, makes them even less attractive for people who have other choices about where to live. Over time, the situation only gets worse. As nearby cities prosper, and the recession appears as just a bump in the road in the rearview mirror, distressed areas are still there, unable to move ahead.

While the fate of Hemet is tied here to the housing bubble of the late 2000s, it also represents the culmination of two older and widespread trends:

  1. The suburbanization of poverty.
  2. The economic issues facing a number of American suburbs with limited tax bases and lower-income residents.

The end of the article – the last paragraph quoted above – is depressing yet it is hard to see how many of these distressed suburbs will move ahead. They face a number of challenges, including just a lack of knowledge regarding how suburban areas can face significant economic and social issues. (In contrast, Americans tend to associate such problems with big cities.) There are a number of ways the communities could turn around but each option is fairly unlikely: a major employer with good jobs moves into town; a philanthropic organization or wealthy resident is willing to dump large sums of money into developments or changes that would benefit the whole community; state or federal governments come up with new programs or monies for suburban communities like this; or metropolitan revenue sharing is instituted and some of the money present in wealthy suburbs is made available to communities that desperately need it.