Tag Archives: poverty

Report shows Chicago region’s poverty split equally between city and suburbs

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Mirroring larger American trends, a new report finds poverty is split evenly between Chicago and its suburbs.

The “Poverty Matters” report, released today by the Heartland Alliance’s Social IMPACT Research Center, says the suburbs accounted for 34 percent of the area’s poor in 1990. Now, the suburbs are home to 50 percent of the area’s poor…

“We were pretty shocked that it balanced out to 50-50,” said research associate Jennifer Clary. “It definitely flies in the face of the image of affluence in the suburbs.”…

Since poverty is a complex problem, the Heartland Alliance report states there is no single reason for the shift. Causes include growth in low-wage work, stagnating wages and shifts in policies for low-income housing, according to the report…

In the suburbs, the poverty rate increased by 33 percent for foreign-born people, 26 percent for native-born whites, 31 percent for native-born Latinos, and 12 percent for native-born blacks from 1990 to 2011.

Given what is happening elsewhere, these findings shouldn’t been too surprising. But, as the report notes, now the onus is on suburban communities to adjust to changing populations.

More low-income students in suburban Chicago school districts

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A number of suburban school districts in the Chicago area have experienced increases in the number of low-income students:

An analysis of Illinois State Report Card data for 83 school districts in the Daily Herald’s circulation area shows poverty rates rose an average of 18 percentage points from 2000 to 2012…In 2000, only East Aurora Unit District 131 and Round Lake Unit District 116 identified at least one-third of students as low-income. None of the 83 districts’ poverty rates were above 50 percent.

By last year, 23 school districts reported their low-income student populations exceeded one-third. And of those, 11 had poverty rates that topped 50 percent.The most drastic increase over that period came in West Chicago Elementary District 33, where the low-income population jumped to 76 percent from 23 percent. Superintendent Kathy Wolfe didn’t respond to requests for comment…

Eight of the top 10 districts in poverty growth are in DuPage County, where the Hispanic population rose 50 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to a 2011 report by the county’s Department of Economic Development and Planning. Over the same period, the number of county residents living in poverty doubled, U.S. Census data shows.

This is not surprising given the increase in poverty in the suburbs in recent years. Yet, it highlights two other issues:

1. Some suburban communities and organizations just don’t perceive themselves as communities where lower-income people live. Traditionally, American suburbs were places for the middle- and upper-class. And, it would be interesting to see how many wealthier Chicago suburb residents would be willing to move to suburbs that have a reputation for being more working- or lower-class. My prediction: few, particularly when articles like this highlight the challenges for suburban schools, a common selling point for suburbs.

2. These same communities and organizations haven’t always allocated or shifted resources to facing the issues that accompany poverty and lower incomes. Providing more resources for schools may be unpopular with many, both because it could mean increased taxes but also because it may mean less money for other local services.

Both of these are hurdles to overcome.

The changing nature of poverty in the Chicago region between 1980 and 2010

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Building off a post two days ago about comparing maps of urban poverty in 1980 and 2010, here is a closer look at how poverty has changed in the Chicago region over the same time period:

The shift is really quite dramatic, in broad terms:

Between 2000 and 2007/11, Cook County’s poverty rate moved from 13.5 percent to 15.8 percent; at the beginning of the decade, its poverty rate was highest in the region, but by 2007/11 it had been surpassed by DeKalb County and Lake County, Indiana, where the rates jumped from 11.4 to 15.9 percent and 12.2 to 16.6 percent, respectively.

Chicago city’s share of its CBSA’s population below poverty declined from a stunning 60 percent of the total to 48 percent of the total between 2000 and 2007/11.

It highlights something important: the decrease in Chicago’s population over the past few decades has gotten a lot of attention, but not the more recent decrease in population in the surrounding cities:

Chicago’s suburban poverty growth stems partly from the hollowing out of older inner suburbs noted by Lucy and Phillips (2003), Hanlon (2010), and others, in which who have more resources move away and are not replaced by others, leaving poor and near-poor households behind. Although the metropolitan area gained population in the 2000s, 122 of the Chicago region’s municipalities lost population. Among these declining cities, the average increase in poverty was 4.2 percentage points, compared with an average poverty growth of 3.1 percentage points in the growing cities.

Indeed, the best known and most severe poverty rate increases in Chicago occurred in a series of suburbs south of Chicago that lost population, including Harvey, Chicago Heights, and Calumet City. This zone of spiraling poverty—increases of 8 to 12 percentage points—amid population loss extends into northwest Indiana. The poverty rate in Gary and East Chicago exceed 30 percent citywide; Hammond’s poverty rate increased from 14 to 22 percent over the decade. Among these cities, only Hammond had a majority-white non-Hispanic population in 2000, and both Gary and Harvey were at least 80 percent black.

This is part of a bigger trend in the United States: poverty has spread to the suburbs, particularly to inner-ring suburbs adjacent to big cities that now face more inner-city issues. This not only upsets traditional views of suburbs as home to the wealthy but also raises a whole set of questions about how existing residents will respond and what social services can be provided. Both of these questions are ones that more and more American communities will face and it is unclear what the outcome will be.

Thinking specifically of the Chicago area poverty data, this is interesting to reconcile with the animosity others in the suburbs or elsewhere in Illinois have for the problems of Chicago. These maps show that issues like race or social class or gangs are not just big-city issues, no matter how much non city dwellers might wish to blame the city.

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.

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.

Big rise in suburban poverty since 2000

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CNBC highlights a Brookings Institution report on the growth in suburban poverty in recent years:

The number of suburban residents living in poverty rose by nearly 64 percent between 2000 and 2011, to about 16.4 million people, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of 95 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. That’s more than double the rate of growth for urban poverty in those areas.

“I think we have an outdated perception of where poverty is and who it is affecting,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the research. “We tend to think of it as a very urban and a very rural phenomenon, but it is increasingly suburban.”

Simons’ situation is complicated by the fact she’s a single mom. Poverty and financial insecurity among single moms is far higher than for households headed by single dads or two parents.

The rate of poverty among single mothers actually improved dramatically through the 1990s, thanks to a strong economy, more favorable tax breaks and the success of so-called welfare-to-work programs. But two recessions and years of high unemployment erased many of those gains.

More and more suburbs now have residents with incomes near or below the poverty line. While suburbs have traditionally been thought of as wealthier places, this is not the case any more. One July 2012 report suggested the poverty rate in American suburbs could stay above 11% for a while. Similar factors that contribute to urban poverty are now also affecting the suburbs: a knowledge and service based economy that makes it difficult for those with less education; residential segregation where different races and classes live in more troubled communities. There are also unique issues contributing to poverty in the suburbs: the need for a car to get around and reach even low-paying jobs, a lack of affordable housing, and a lack of social services in communities that may not be used to providing such services.

Housing for the poor in Hong Kong

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Like in many global cities, affordable housing is a big issue in Hong Kong:

Some 100,000 people in the former British colony live in what’s known as inadequate housing, according to the Society for Community Organization, a social welfare group. The category also includes apartments subdivided into tiny cubicles or filled with coffin-sized wood and metal sleeping compartments as well as rooftop shacks. They’re a grim counterpoint to the southern Chinese city’s renowned material affluence.

Forced by skyrocketing housing prices to live in cramped, dirty and unsafe conditions, their plight also highlights one of the biggest headaches facing Hong Kong’s unpopular Beijing-backed leader: growing public rage over the city’s housing crisis.

Leung Chun-ying took office as Hong Kong’s chief executive in July pledging to provide more affordable housing in a bid to cool the anger. Home prices rose 23 percent in the first 10 months of 2012 and have doubled since bottoming out in 2008 during the global financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund said in a report last month. Rents have followed a similar trajectory…

His comments mark a distinct shift from predecessor Donald Tsang, who ignored the problem. Legislators and activists, however, slammed Leung for a lack of measures to boost the supply in the short term. Some 210,000 people are on the waiting list for public housing, about double from 2006. About a third of Hong Kong’s 7.1 million population lives in public rental flats. When apartments bought with government subsidies are included, the figure rises to nearly half…

While cage homes, which sprang up in the 1950s to cater mostly to single men coming in from mainland China, are becoming rarer, other types of substandard housing such as cubicle apartments are growing as more families are pushed into poverty. Nearly 1.19 million people were living in poverty in the first half of last year, up from 1.15 million in 2011, according to the Hong Kong Council Of Social Services. There’s no official poverty line but it’s generally defined as half of the city’s median income of HK$12,000 ($1,550) a month.

While many cities face this issue (including long waiting lists for public housing in Chicago), the contrasts are stark in Hong Kong which boasts a world-class business district. Add this to lack of open space, leading to higher housing prices, and this is an issue that likely requires an ambitious plan over many years to even address part of this housing shortage.

Highlights from the “Illinois’s 33%” poverty report

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A new report from the Social Impact Research Center, “Illinois’s 33%,”  looks at poverty in Illinois. Here are a few highlights:

1. Something I did not realize: the preamble to the Illinois Constitution mentions “eliminat[ing] poverty” (p.1).

“We, the People of the State of Illinois…in order to provide for the health, safety and welfare of the people; maintain a representative and orderly government; eliminate poverty and inequality; assure legal, social and economic justice; provide opportunity for the fullest development of the individual; ensure domestic tranquility; provide for the common defense; and secure the blessings of freedom and liberty to ourselves and our posterity—do ordain and establish this Constitution for the State of Illinois.”

2. The report is not just about poverty; it is also about people in near-poverty. The income thresholds for this are here (p.5):

This methodology of measuring people with low incomes or near poverty seems to be growing. The Census reports the median household income in Illinois is $56,576.

3. There is definitely some geographic disparity in these figures. Here are the numbers for the Chicago region which clearly shows wealthier and less wealthy counties and Chicago neighborhoods (p.7):

I did not see any calls for metropolitan approaches to poverty. In the Chicago region, it would be difficult to deal with a particular problem, say affordable housing, in just Chicago or a few of its neighborhoods without cooperation and input from others in the region.

4. The report has more figures and possible solutions in five areas that could help people move out of poverty: employment, education, housing, health & nutrition, and assets (p.3-4, 15-17).

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…

Editorial: to lower poverty rate in the US, we need to talk about it first

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An editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News suggests there is currently a big stumbling block in dealing with record poverty levels in the United States: no one is talking about it.

One argument that has gained currency is that the poor aren’t really poor, because they have refrigerators and cell phones. Here’s another: The worst economic downturn since the Great Depression doesn’t qualify as “circumstances beyond their control.” Instead, people who lose their jobs and can’t find others just aren’t looking hard enough. And the most shocking of all: To punish their parents, it’s OK to let children go hungry and suffer the health and educational ramifications of malnutrition.

That’s how some people think of poverty – if they think about it at all…

Yet politicians of all leanings just don’t want to talk about it, almost certainly taking their cues from the populace at large. In a recent study, the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting looked at six months of national political coverage and found that poverty was the subject of less than 0.2 percent of the stories – that is, only 17 out of 10,489.

In order to do something about poverty, we have to be able to recognize it. An organization sponsored by the Center for American Progress called “Half in Ten” (www.halfinten.org) has set a goal of halving the U.S. poverty rate in 10 years by putting it back on the national agenda. First step: “updating” Americans’ understanding of poverty, beginning with the way it is calculated. The current method – used for nearly a half-century – multiplies estimated food costs by three, which doesn’t take into account increased expenses such as housing, transportation and child care – and gives a much brighter picture than the actual reality.

Half in Ten is urging Americans to “tweet” the moderators of the presidential debates using the hashtag #talkpoverty to challenge the candidates on how they would reduce poverty in their first 100 days in office.

The modern era: fighting poverty through Twitter.

I’ve noted this issue before; the major political candidates don’t talk about poverty. They may talk about hardship and economic troubles but they tend to stick to middle-class dreams and helping Americans join this aspirational group. According to the New York Times, the word “poverty” was spoken at a rate of 3 per 25,000 words by Democrats and 5 per 25,000 words by Republicans. In contrast, the phrase “middle class” was used at a rate of 47 per 25,000 words by Democrats and 7 per 25,000 words by Republicans.

At the same time, I wonder if Joel Best’s writings about the possible problems with declaring war on social problems, such as poverty, apply here. How do you keep the momentum of a fifty year war going? How do you know when the US has “won” the war on poverty? One advantage of declaring war on a social problem is that it can draw media attention because of the implications of war. Yet, it sounds like the media isn’t paying much attention either.