Children and Their Communities

Percentage of Public Elementary/Secondary Students in High-Poverty Schools, by Race/Ethnicity and Locale, School Year 2006-07

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.

Two out of three black children born between 1985 and 2000 are growing up in a neighborhood with at least a 20 percent poverty rate.

We can do a much better job of reducing poverty by improving government assistance to households in need. But there is no way to end poverty and its companion, hunger, until we pay special attention to the needs of poor, marginalized communities like Crow Creek, Hunt’s Point, and Perry County. This chapter offers a broader perspective on what families in such environments need to prosper. It’s a far greater challenge to address those needs than to target assistance to individual households.

If we are serious about ending child hunger, helping marginalized communities is not a challenge we can afford to take lightly, explains a 2009 study by the Pew Charitable Trust. Analyzing decades of census data, researcher Patrick Sharkey found that the strongest determinant of a child’s economic and social mobility is the level of poverty in the neighborhood where he or she grows up.¹ The data revealed that children growing up in neighborhoods where there was a reduction in poverty of 10 percent or more had higher incomes as adults than children growing up in neighborhoods where poverty rates did not improve.

“These data provide support for the idea that neighborhoods, communities, and metropolitan areas are central to processes of economic mobility,” said Sharkey.² Neighborhoods matter more than parents’ incomes, education, or marital status—more than any other factor. Ignoring this fact amounts to child neglect on a societal level.

The existence of poor neighborhoods undermines the whole notion of inclusive and sustainable economic growth.

Issues