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In times of hardship, people turn to their neighbors for help. It’s the very essence of community. In healthy communities, networks of friends, family, and neighbors are assets that individuals can lean on for advice when times get tough or for help in finding jobs and advancing their careers. But networks don’t function this way in communities where unemployment is the rule and most people are struggling.
The disadvantages of living in a poor community pile up in configurations that analysts with little experience in such places have a hard time seeing and understanding. Policy solutions frequently miss the mark because they aren’t designed to deal with problems that affect a community as a whole. For example, when policymakers look for ways to reduce poverty, it’s easy to see only problems within the household. Not enough food in the home? Enroll the family in nutrition programs. Jobs don’t pay enough? Apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Too poor to afford health insurance? Get on Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
But none of these solutions gets to the heart of the daily barriers that confront families in high-poverty communities. A poorly educated child is rarely an isolated case; groups of poorly educated children attend underperforming schools in neighborhoods with a host of other problems. In Detroit, for example, three-fourths of all children drop out of high school.1 Detroit’s problems are legion. Joblessness, crime, substance abuse, broken families, substandard housing, food insecurity, and poor health: these are all common in high-poverty communities.
Children’s attitudes toward work are formed in an environment where chronic unemployment is the norm, and this comes to represent another obstacle to overcoming cycles of poverty in families. “We have to work with them to get them prepared to take jobs”—comments like this are echoed across the country wherever unemployment is double, triple, or quadruple the norm. “You’ve got to talk to them to explain that once you get a job you are expected to go to work every day. If you’ve never been around family members and neighbors with stable jobs, you just don’t know this.”
The point of this chapter is that poverty is about place as much as it is about people.
Persistently poor communities require attention over and above what is done to help poor households living there.
The problems that plague these communities, such as joblessness, lack of services and crumbling infrastructure, go largely ignored because the solutions are difficult and complex and require a substantial commitment of time and resources.
It’s easy to look at a person who is diabetic because of obesity and think that this person’s problem is self-control. It’s harder to make such a simple judgment once you realize that there are no places to buy healthy foods. On the Blackfeet Indian reservation in Montana, it’s a half-day drive to the nearest supermarket. Nutrition programs are helpful, but they don’t solve the food-access problem in a community with only fast food and convenience stores.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina raised public awareness of concentrated poverty. To the horror and dismay of many television viewers around the country, residents of the Ninth Ward in New Orleans were left behind when the levies broke and their neighborhoods flooded. Dismay soon gave way to disgust and anger at the ineptitude of the institutions and individuals ostensibly responsible for responding to such crises.
A booming economy in the late 1990s brought higher incomes for U.S. jobholders. Poverty declined nationwide, both in cities and rural areas, as the economy grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent, the highest since the 1960s. The number of people living in high-poverty communities fell by 25 percent. By 2000, unemployment dipped below 4 percent—the lowest it had reached in 30 years. The economy was effectively operating at full employment, meaning that everyone or nearly everyone who wants a job can find one.
Federal and state transportation policies have done more to reinforce socioeconomic inequalities than to correct them. “Data that might help decide how to spend the money, such as economic benefits, environmental impacts, or social inclusion, is ignored or not even collected,” says Robert Puentes, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Federal spending on public transportation averages about 20 percent of all transportation spending. Since the end of World War II, transportation policies have favored building roads and highways instead of mass transit.
In Perry County, AL, diabetes rates are five times the national average. The county has been described as a “food desert,” meaning there is extremely limited access to healthy foods. Frances Ford, who grew up in Marion, the county seat, remembers a choice of three grocery stores in the 1960s and 1970s. Now there is one. The high rates of obesity and diabetes are related to the lack of access to healthy foods, and not having adequate health care services makes the situation that much worse.
Community colleges are unique in America’s landscape of postsecondary institutions, and the range of services they provide makes them a vital resource for developing the human capital of high-poverty communities. The American Association of Community Colleges describes the community college’s role as offering postsecondary education to “all who desire to learn, regardless of wealth, heritage, or previous academic experience.” There are more than 1,100 community colleges in the United States, and the number rises to more than 1,600 if branch campuses are counted.
Anybody experienced in handling U.S. poverty data would point out that most poor people do not live in high-poverty communities. More poor people live in suburbs than in rural or urban areas. But poor households in non-poor communities are much better off. They benefit from assets in their community that don’t exist in poorer ones. Clean air, for example, is rarely considered an asset vital to escaping poverty, until it is replaced by toxic fumes from diesel trucks. Examples throughout this chapter illustrate how poor communities do without assets that are taken for granted in better-off communities.
