Housing Mobility Part 2: Concentrated Poverty

In part two of this three-part series by Alexander Polikoff, we examine the effects of concentrated poverty on young children.  Click here to read the first post, which addresses the history of housing mobility.  For those wishing to delve more deeply, source materials are provided at the end of each post.

Concentrated Poverty

The multiple reasons BPI supports housing mobility programs include: fairness to African American families trapped in segregated high-poverty neighborhoods; remedying, in however limited a way, generations of government-fostered segregation; and benefiting the larger society by enabling more children of color to become productive citizens instead of victims caught in the welfare and criminal justice systems.  In recent years, post-Gautreaux research on the effects of concentrated poverty on young children has deepened understanding of this last reason.

At least since Dickens indelibly rendered Oliver Twist’s searing experiences, policymakers and social scientists have been thinking about poverty.  But focused thinking about concentrated poverty did not begin until the 1987 publication of William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged. In the ensuing years society has learned a great deal about the effects of concentrated poverty.

The challenges of being poor are familiar and can be summarized in a phrase—the daily struggle for survival.  But the challenges of being poor and living in a really poor place are worse, a kind of “double jeopardy.”  A study by that very name cites research showing that even if children live in a high-poverty neighborhood for a limited time, negative effects on verbal ability linger after departure from the neighborhood (Hernandez 2012: 10). A Brookings Institution Study asks “Why Does Concentrated Poverty Matter?” and answers with a list that includes limited educational opportunity, high crime, poor health, and many more (Kneebone et al. 2011). Recent research is showing that the worst of these negative effects is visited upon young children.

The ACE Study. The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE Study is the largest examination ever conducted of the effects of childhood abuse, neglect and other stressors on adult mental and physical health (Felitti et al. 1998). The results demonstrate an astonishing correlation between childhood adversity and adult well-being. As a result of the ACE Study, childhood adversity is often termed America’s most important public health issue.

Although the ACE Study establishes correlation, not causation, medical research is exposing the causal links.  For example, one study finds that early, repeated activation of the body’s stress system actually alters brain chemistry. A consequence is that adults who have experienced early trauma often show increased aggression, impulsive behavior, and weakened cognition.

From countless sources in the literature, but also from common sense, we know that severely distressed neighborhoods are places where stress and trauma are pervasive. We know therefore that high “ACE scores” are likely to be accumulated not only within households—the focus of the ACE Study—but also within the geography of concentrated poverty.

But a high ACE score is not just a number. ACERs, as they are called, with a score of four or above are more than twice as likely as those with a score of zero to have heart or lung disease in adulthood, over four times more likely to suffer depression.  A male child with an ACE score of six is forty six times more likely than one with a zero score to use drugs intravenously as an adult. ACERs with a score of six or more die on average two decades earlier than those with zero scores.

Statistically speaking, therefore, children growing up in concentrated poverty neighborhoods face a high risk of blighted adulthoods. Hundreds of studies, writes William Julius Wilson, suggest that concentrated poverty increases the likelihood of “joblessness, dropping out of school, lower educational achievement, involvement in crime,” and so on (Wilson 2010: 46).

That conclusion comes from an academic. Around the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, James Baldwin wrote in non-academic language to his nephew and namesake that he had been “set down in a ghetto . . . born into a society in which your countrymen have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives” (Baldwin 1962).

Getting Worse? Concentrated poverty in the social science literature is generally viewed as a neighborhood—a census tract—with a poverty rate of 30 or 40 percent or more, although 20 percent is the threshold at which the negative effects of concentrated poverty are said to appear.  Social scientists generally view the poverty rate as a rough proxy for the characteristics associated with severely distressed neighborhoods.

Recent data tell us that we have more of such places than ever before. Since 2000, both the number of concentrated poverty census tracts and the number of poor people living in them has increased by some 50% (Jargowsky 2013: 3). Despite some geographic spreading out, the tracts are predominantly in a small number of cities within large metropolitan areas. For example, in the Chicago area, 97 of 115 concentrated poverty tracts and 88% of persons living within them are in the city of Chicago (Jargowsky 2013: 15).

Nationwide, nearly 8 million children live in concentrated poverty census tracts, over half of them in “double jeopardy” because in addition to living in very poor places their families are in poverty (Casey 2012: 1).  In some large cities over half the entire child population lives in concentrated poverty neighborhoods (Casey 2012: 2).  For African Americans the statistics are especially sobering—nearly half of poor black children (45%) live in concentrated poverty tracts, nine times the rate for poor white children (Casey 2012: 2).

To repeat that startling statistic for emphasis, nearly half of poor African American children live in concentrated poverty neighborhoods. Given that we now know that, with high statistical likelihood, these children will suffer blighted adulthoods, this is a shocker.  We are talking about the appalling fact that nearly one of every two poor African American children in this country faces a high risk of a blighted adulthood. Though he lacked the data we now possess, that is what James Baldwin may well have meant when he wrote fifty years ago of the destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Source Materials

Barton, Paul E., and Richard J. Coley. 2010. The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped. Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service.

Hernandez, Donald J. 2012. “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation.” Baltimore: Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Kneebone, Elizabeth, Carey Nadeau, and Alan Berube. 2011. “The Re-Emergence of Concetrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s.” Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Turner, Margery Austin. 2014. “Affordable Housing in Safe Neighborhoods: Four Lessons for Success.” Metro Trends, May 16.

Turner, Margery Austin, Austin Nicols, and Jennifer Comey, with Kaitlin Franks and David Price. 2012. Benefits of Living in High-Opportunity Neighborhoods. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.

Turner, Margery Austin, Peter Edelman, Erika Poethig, and Laudon Aron with Matthew Rogers and Christopher Lowenstein. 2014. Tackling Persistent Poverty in Distressed Urban Neighborhoods: History, Principles, and Strategies for Philanthropic Investment. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.