Place-Based Poverty Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/tag/place-based-poverty/ Real People. Real Stories. Real Solutions. Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:14:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://cdn.talkpoverty.org/content/uploads/2016/02/29205224/tp-logo.png Place-Based Poverty Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/tag/place-based-poverty/ 32 32 A Billionaire’s Bid to Bring Amazon to Detroit https://talkpoverty.org/2018/01/08/billionaires-bid-bring-amazon-detroit/ Mon, 08 Jan 2018 14:53:20 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24927 When Amazon solicited bids this fall for the location of its new 50,000-employee headquarters, 238 North American cities tossed their hats in the ring. They’re competing with one another to put together the most attractive incentive package for the tech giant, offering everything from cash to large-scale infrastructure projects. And many of their proposals divert public funds—which would otherwise go to schools, public transportation, or other city services—directly into Amazon’s pockets.

Chicago, for instance, would allow Amazon to directly collect $1.32 billion in income taxes paid by its workers. Fresno, California’s bid creates a committee jointly run by Amazon and city officials to determine how to spend the taxes and fees generated by Amazon’s presence in the city. Newark, New Jersey is going the most direct route, with a $7 billion tax incentive package that includes an option for Amazon to dodge the city’s wage tax for 20 years.

Cities with less money have gotten more creative in their attempts to lure the company. Stonecrest, Georgia offered to annex 345 acres for Amazon to run its own city, named “Amazon, Georgia,” with Jeff Bezos as the appointed “mayor for life.” Kansas City’s mayor purchased 1,000 products on Amazon just so he could write product reviews persuading the company to come to his city. And Tucson, Arizona sent a 21-foot saguaro cactus to Amazon headquarters in Seattle (which the company rejected, saying they “can’t accept gifts”).

Yet perhaps the most noteworthy bid came from Detroit, not because of what it contains—the details of the bid are still private—but because of who submitted it. Unlike almost all of the other 237 proposals, Detroit’s bid wasn’t submitted by its city government or Chamber of Commerce. It was submitted by Dan Gilbert.

With a net worth of $6.1 billion, Gilbert is Michigan’s richest citizen. He built his fortune mainly through his company, Quicken Loans, though he’s perhaps best known as the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers. During Detroit’s foreclosure crisis, Gilbert invested heavily in downtown real estate, buying up blighted and struggling properties through his real estate company, Bedrock. To date, he’s spent more than $2 billion of his own money on Detroit real estate—slightly more than the city’s annual budget—and he now owns more than 70 properties downtown.

Amazon’s list of criteria for its new headquarters includes a metropolitan area with more than 1 million people, a “business-friendly environment,” and up to 8 million square feet to build its sprawling campus. Many cities are disqualified because they simply don’t have enough space—8 million square feet is more than the combined office space in the entire city of Wilmington, Delaware. But Dan Gilbert can meet this requirement on his own: He currently owns 15 million square feet of real estate in downtown Detroit.

Like many of our country’s beloved billionaires, Gilbert’s accumulation of wealth may have involved less-than-scrupulous practices. A suite of lawsuits against Quicken Loans allege that the company engaged in fraudulent and predatory lending. In 2012, the West Virginia Supreme Court awarded $2.8 million to a plaintiff after Quicken added a balloon payment of $107,015.71 on the end of a $144,800 loan after 30 years. In July, a federal district court fined the company $11 million in a separate class action suit that alleged that Quicken’s appraisers inflated the market value of customers’ properties, “putting them underwater on their loans from the start.” Quicken Loans has said it plans to appeal the ruling. Yet another lawsuit is still pending: The U.S. Justice Department alleges that the company violated the False Claims Act—which prevents corporations from defrauding government programs—and knowingly altered or overlooked information in loan applications.

Regardless of how Gilbert obtained his fortune, it’s given him immense power over his struggling city. A 2014 National Journal article, “Is Dan Gilbert Detroit’s New Superhero?”, describes Gilbert’s growing regional power: “elected office could hardly augment his financial influence over Detroit … Gilbert has established himself as Detroit’s de facto CEO.” Even though the article sounds like it was written by Gilbert’s public relations team—at one point it suggests that he’s the “savior of Detroit”—its description of his control over the city’s downtown is frightening:

In the absence of a functioning, solvent local government, Gilbert has taken it upon himself to confront safety concerns by installing a state-of-the-art surveillance system downtown to supplement an underfunded and undermanned Detroit Police Department. The ACLU says it disapproves of this given the potential privacy concerns but says it cannot prevent business owners from monitoring their own properties.

However, a journalist for Motor City Muckraker claimed that Gilbert’s company, Rock Ventures, wasn’t just monitoring its own properties. He interviewed building owners who claimed that the company installed cameras on their property without their consent. (Rock Ventures denies these claims, and Dan Gilbert referred to the journalist as “dirty scum.”)

Three years later, his power is still growing. In May, the Michigan state legislature passed the “Transformational Brownfield” bills—colloquially known as the “Gilbert bills”—which give him access to up to $1 billion in public funds for his development projects. The bills divert the income taxes paid by any resident or employee who moves into his buildings, creating a situation like that in Chicago’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters—citizens no longer pay taxes to the city government; instead, they pay taxes directly to Gilbert’s real estate corporation.

Peter Hammer, director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights, says the Gilbert bills “marked a dangerous shift between public and private.” Hammer says that you used to be able to say that Gilbert “was an entrepreneur using his own money,” so whether you approved of him or not, at least it was on his own dime. But now, that’s changed.

Detroit has been cutting deals with developers in an attempt to revitalize the city for at least a decade. In 2013, the city approved $283 million in taxpayer funds to finance the construction of a new Red Wings stadium—at least $18 million of which came from school funding, according to former Michigan House Representative Rashida Tlaib. And in 2007, Detroit’s city council gave Marathon Oil a $175 million tax break to expand its operations, with the understanding that they would hire more Detroiters. But the project only created 15 jobs for Detroit’s citizens, which means the city’s taxpayers paid more than $11 million per job. In return, Marathon Oil has been dumping petcoke, a petroleum byproduct, on the outskirts of the Detroit River. On windy days, this produces thick, black dust clouds that blow far beyond the banks of the river.

That trickle-down approach is what has allowed Gilbert to thrive while the rest of Detroit falls apart

The return on investment for subsidies to Gilbert’s Quicken Loans isn’t much better. Residential mortgage lending has completely dried up in Detroit. There were just 356 new mortgages each year on average from 2009 to 2014, compared with 6,103 from 2004 to 2008.

“You get this huge contrast downtown, where you’re getting huge public subsidies for development, and in your neighborhoods, you can’t even get a commercial mortgage to buy a house,” Hammer says.

That disparity has created what residents call “the tale of two cities.” The city is 142 square miles, but almost all of the media attention and investment—Gilbert’s included—goes to the 7.2 square miles that make up its gentrifying core. While Detroit is 83 percent black, this downtown core is overwhelmingly white.

In July, Rock Ventures appeared to brag about Detroit’s racial disparity in a downtown window ad. The ad featured an almost entirely white crowd next to the slogan “See Detroit like we do.”

Gilbert seems to have learned his lesson about advertising optics when he helped create the “Detroit Moves the World” campaign for the city’s Amazon bid. Their masthead video is narrated with a spoken word performance from Jessica Care Moore, a black activist and poet, and features rhythmic images of a diverse array of artists, scientists, and workers in the city.

The video is inspiring, but after years of uneven revitalization, it may prove fruitless. Aside from Gilbert, most people don’t consider Detroit to be a serious contender, in large part because its development has ignored the majority of its citizens. One of Amazon’s selection criteria is a robust transportation system that can easily handle an influx of 50,000 new workers. On this point alone, Detroit fails spectacularly. Its largest transportation project in recent years is a new streetcar line that only travels 3.3 miles up and down Detroit’s gentrified core. It was largely privately funded, and has been named “QLINE” in honor of one of its major backers, Quicken Loans.

Even if Amazon were to select Detroit for its new headquarters, there’s not much evidence to suggest that it would solve the crisis residents are facing. How would it help a family whose water has just been shut off, and who must find a new school for their kids because all the schools in the neighborhood have closed? It’s tempting to think that a profitable, futuristic firm like Amazon is just what a city needs to kick start its development. But that trickle-down approach is what has allowed Gilbert to thrive while the rest of Detroit falls apart.

Of course, it’s not Dan Gilbert’s job—nor is it Amazon’s—to ensure that the city’s residents have their basic needs met. But if Detroiters have to wait for a billionaire to save their city, they’ll be waiting forever.

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The Obama Legacy: Place-Based Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2016/12/14/obama-legacy-place-based-poverty/ Wed, 14 Dec 2016 15:01:56 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21911 I have spent the last 50-plus years of my life fighting poverty. In 1967, when I worked for Senator Robert Kennedy as his legislative aide, the Senator and I traveled to Mississippi. We saw children starving—literally—with bloated bellies, open sores that wouldn’t heal. Our nation did the right thing then—we expanded the food stamp program—and that’s why you don’t see that kind of starvation here today.

But we had to fight for it. And now we are going to have to fight again.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump spoke about America’s inner cities in dystopian terms, rendering a picture even more dire than the real one (which is plenty bleak). He promised that he would fix everything, without providing any specifics. But city leaders were quick to point out that he wasn’t really speaking to the residents themselves, who understand the challenges their communities face on a daily basis. Instead, he chose to play up stories about crime and violence to appeal to the worst instincts of white voters.

If President-elect Trump had a real interest in addressing concentrated urban poverty, he could build on President Obama’s record and learn about the important work that is already happening in every major city.

Instead, we will soon see an all-out attack on virtually every federal program that helps low-income people, from cradle to the grave, wherever they live. It will put millions of Americans at risk, whether it’s losing food or health care or housing. Anyone who cares needs to join in fighting back—those who are directly suffering, and those who have the privilege to remain untouched by retrogressive policy. At the same time, we can’t limit ourselves to defensive action—we need to put forth a vision for our future and work toward its realization.

Many of the policies that low-income neighborhoods need do not focus on them exclusively. A real full-employment policy would help beached boats float wherever they are, and raising the minimum wage would help low-wage workers across the country climb out of poverty.

Obama understood that the quality of life in high-poverty places depends on a mosaic of policies.

President Obama took us forward on these matters, sometimes in big steps and sometimes small. He had many other significant efforts blocked by Congress—such as his most recent jobs proposal, an increased minimum wage, and comprehensive immigration reform. His housing initiatives reflected his commitment to people having a genuine choice about whether to stay in their current community with improved economic conditions or move to opportunities elsewhere. He did not achieve radical change, but he understood that the quality of life in high-poverty places depends on a mosaic of policies—and he was heading in the right direction.

The Obama administration undertook place-based work that targeted rural, urban, and tribal communities. In fact, its efforts to support neighborhood revitalization have been more impressive than any previous administration—even given the funding limitations imposed by the Republican-majority Congress that has been in place since 2010.

Obama’s creation of Promise Neighborhoods, based on the work of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone, was a significant innovation towards that end. The initiative uses schools as hubs for community partnerships, where cradle-to-career educational programs and family supports are designed to improve educational and development outcomes for children. Since 2010, a dozen Promise Neighborhoods have received sizable five-year grants for implementation and are operating on a substantial scale.

Through executive action, President Obama also created Promise Zones. These low-income neighborhoods receive preference for funding from a variety of existing federal programs. The marshaling of funds that are already appropriated means that program money is spent where it is needed most, and that’s something that should appeal to progressives and conservatives alike.

The Obama Administration also reconstituted the first President Bush’s HOPE VI into a version 2.0, called Choice Neighborhoods. Had it been properly funded, it would have had more reach in helping to build stronger communities through mixed-income housing, including housing for people with the lowest incomes. This was a key effort given that rental assistance to families with children is at its lowest point since 2004, and homelessness of school-aged children is at a record high.

Support from the Obama Administration—including grants from these place-based programs—have fostered the growth of a number of sophisticated, multifaceted inner-city organizations and partnerships, all doing valuable work for children and families, the elderly, and people with disabilities.

The Youth Policy Institute (YPI) in Los Angeles—which focuses on poverty reduction through support services, educational opportunities, and job training and career support—has been able to use this funding from Washington to further develop its model and reach, and to engage thousands of families with services and supports. The organization’s work includes five of its own schools, after-school programs at 78 schools, and 83 public computer centers. It also offers Early Head Start, teen pregnancy prevention, job readiness, and job placement services. YPI works with families on parenting skills, financial planning, and computer literacy. They help day laborers and teach community agriculture. In all, YPI has 1,600 staff serving more than 100,000 youth and adults at 125 program sites. It works with 60 partners, and has a budget of $41 million annually—and its partners’ budgets add up to a much greater sum.

Because YPI is three decades old and receives state, local, and private funding, it will likely weather a Trump storm; but many newer organizations may face rougher sailing. The competitive funding they’ve received from the Obama administration for the last eight years has been a major factor in their growth.

All of the Obama Administration's place-based work is at risk.

Indeed, now all of the Obama Administration’s place-based work (and more) is at risk.

The Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, SNAP, housing vouchers, and many more critical programs all face the prospect of being totally axed or turned into block grants—either way, it means far less people having access to basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare. Support for good schools and accessible transportation, aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, and true criminal justice reform—all critical for urban residents—are on the block for deep budget cuts and gutting through executive action.

These cuts, and the weakening of community-based organizations, place children in particular in deep jeopardy. Without a real jobs program and investment in communities that have been stripped of their wealth, families will not have the resources to support the developmental needs of their children. Trump has put out a so-called jobs initiative, but the purported infrastructure plan is nothing but a tax cut to make the rich richer.

Perhaps the threatened Trump cuts reveal the road map we need to fight back. The federal policies helping people—and the initiatives revitalizing neighborhoods—serve millions of people, through thousands of organizations. Businesses and faith leaders, foundations, local public officials and community leaders, and regular people—if we are organized—can stand up and fight back against those who would do us harm.

We’ve done it before and now we must do it once again. This is not over yet.

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

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What Living in a High-Poverty Neighborhood Taught Me About Protests https://talkpoverty.org/2016/10/18/living-high-poverty-neighborhood-taught-protests/ Tue, 18 Oct 2016 13:29:27 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=21502 About 13 years ago, I lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where I was trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer.  The going was tough. I moved to the Eastside where the rents were lower, and the paint was peeling off the old manor-style houses. Soon, I noticed that friends were reluctant to visit me. At night, I heard the “pop-pops” that I wished were firecrackers, but knew were gunshots.

You probably aren’t familiar with the Eastside of Charleston, but you know a place like it: It’s segregated by race, and associated with poverty, crime, and violence—derogatively called “the ghetto” or “the ‘hood.” It’s the part of town that you have been cautioned to avoid.

More and more Americans who struggle to get by are living in these marginalized, disinvested communities where jobs and educational opportunities are scarce, and an increasingly militarized police force is the primary contact residents have with government. But for two years, Americans have been expressing confusion as one neighborhood after another—from Milwaukee to Baltimore to Ferguson to Charlotte—are rocked by protests, looting, and riots after the police shootings of unarmed black men.

Is it really a surprise that many of the renewed outbreaks of civil unrest have taken place in these communities?

Although the impact of living in high-poverty neighborhoods has been well documented, it’s hard to fully explain the toll it takes on a person’s body and soul. Frustration over high prices, high bills, and high unemployment rates is worsened by the bane of many a poor community—the local drug economy.

It’s hard to fully explain the toll it takes on a person’s body and soul.

The vast majority of my neighbors, young and old, did their best to avoid the drug trade. My next-door neighbor was so overprotective of his two daughters that he refused to let them leave the house after 7 p.m. I knew many teenagers who resisted it for years, but faced with no prospects for their future, or for good jobs with good pay, they decided “to go to work”—usually in the summer when they were out of school. Dealing drugs was the neighborhood summer job program. And for many young neighbors who were expelled from school (because administrators are more likely to punish black students than provide more holistic help), the drug trade was less an alternative than an inevitability.

Outsiders often criticized Eastside residents for not taking care of their own community, or not doing enough to stymie the drug trafficking. This victim-blaming ignored the roots of the drug problem—the lack of opportunity, racism, and economic forces outside of residents’ control—and it ignored the role that outsiders played. It was common to see long lines of cars that clearly belonged to nonresidents (that is, mostly whites) trolling every night to the wee hours of the morning, looking to score drugs with no concern over the consequences for families, mothers, or children trying to sleep.

I eventually saved enough money to leave the Eastside, but not much has changed since I left. The kinds of investment in the community that would have convinced me to stay didn’t exist (and still don’t). It was no wonder that those of us who lived there believed the city, state, and even the nation did not respect—or even consider—our humanity.

The Eastside is hardly unique. If you look at the statistics associated with any of the marginalized, predominantly black communities in cities that have erupted in civil unrest, a pattern becomes clear. In Baltimore, an overwhelming majority of public school students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunches (which are often used as a proxy for students’ socioeconomic status). The median income in Freddie Gray’s own neighborhood is just $24,006 a year.  A Department of Justice report on Ferguson, Missouri confirmed that the municipal police department engaged in poverty exploitation by targeting blacks for traffic violations, singling them out in a city where 53% of blacks live in poor neighborhoods. Milwaukee has been called one of the most segregated cities in America.

There’s an obvious solution for these communities (and it isn’t gentrification, which simply displaces generational residents). The solution lies in more targeted investments—for example, in jobs or education programs—that give people a chance to succeed. The bleak situation for the 13.5 million people in high-poverty neighborhoods must be ameliorated, or else somewhere, sometime soon, civil unrest will break out again.

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White New Orleans Has Recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Black New Orleans Has Not. https://talkpoverty.org/2016/08/29/white-new-orleans-recovered-hurricane-katrina-black-new-orleans-not/ Mon, 29 Aug 2016 13:20:21 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=17189 96,000.

That’s how many fewer African-Americans are living in New Orleans now than prior to Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall 11 years ago today. Nearly 1 in 3 black residents have not returned to the city after the storm.

It was the worst urban disaster in modern U.S. history. Eighty percent of New Orleans lay under water after the epic collapse of the area’s flood-protection system—more than 110,000 homes and another 20,000 plus businesses, along with most of the city’s schools, police and fire stations, electrical plans, and its public transportation system.

Unlike last year, when the 10th anniversary meant satellite trucks clogging the streets, this anniversary is unlikely to draw much media attention—which would be a shame if I thought the coverage last year was any good.

Large stretches of New Orleans were still reeling from the disaster last summer, as those satellite trucks sat parked in the French Quarter.  There, the on-air talent did their stand-ups against the backdrop of Jackson Square and the media rarely ventured to the eastern half of the city, where most of the city’s black residents lived prior to Katrina.

On the east side they might have shot footage of the Seventh Ward, a black working-class community that was still only around 60 percent rebuilt a decade after Katrina. They could have gone to Pontchartrain Park, a black middle class community that the actor Wendell Pierce, who had grown up there, dubbed a “black Mayberry.” Pontchartrain Park was doing no better than the Seventh Ward. Or they might have reported from New Orleans East, a black professional class neighborhood still pocked by boarded-up strip malls and abandoned businesses. It is maybe 80 to 85 percent rebuilt eleven years after Katrina.

Most shocking is the Lower Ninth Ward, where the average resident was living on $16,000 a year before the hurricane. You can still drive blocks there and not see a single home. The neighborhood is still missing more than half its pre-Katrina population.

The great need in parts of the city where the tourists rarely venture was not what the media—or the city’s white civic leaders—were focused on.

Yet the great need in parts of the city where the tourists rarely venture was not what the media—or the city’s white civic leaders—were focused on. Instead, the story line was what city officials dubbed the “New Orleans miracle.” In his state of the city address a few months before the 10th anniversary, Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared victory over Katrina: New Orleans was “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding,” he said.  According to the mayor the city was “America’s greatest comeback story,” and he oversaw a three-month celebration dubbed “Katrina 10: Resilient New Orleans.” For white communities, it was true: Lakeview, a prosperous white neighborhood on the east side that also suffered catastrophic flooding, looks better than it did before the storm because of all the new homes and businesses.

Just a year earlier, Landrieu had protested when a writer for The Atlantic referred to him as the city’s first white mayor in 36 years.  “I don’t see myself as a white mayor or the city as a black city,” he said.

But it’s hard to imagine a black mayor, in a style reminiscent of George W. Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech, triumphantly describing the recovery as a thing of the past when there was still so much suffering in the eastern half of the city.

Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm. A black homeowner in New Orleans was more than three times as likely to have been flooded as a white homeowner. That wasn’t due to bad luck; because of racially discriminatory housing practices, the high-ground was taken by the time banks started loaning money to African Americans who wanted to buy a home.

Nor has New Orleans experienced an equal opportunity recovery—in no small part because of the white civic leaders who openly advocated for a whiter, wealthier city. While water still covered most of New Orleans, Jimmy Reiss, a prominent local businessman and then-head of the Business Council, told the Wall Street Journal that the city would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically,” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. That sentiment was paired with a policy approach then-Congressman Barney Frank described as “ethnic cleansing through inaction.”

Now, New Orleans no longer has a public hospital, though prior to Katrina, it was home to the nation’s oldest one. Before the storm, the city was home to thousands of units of affordable housing in a quartet of housing projects locals now call the “Big Four.” Large portions of the Big Four had escaped with little or no water damage. Yet elected officials chose to bulldoze all four anyway. The largest housing recovery program in U.S. history, “Road Home,” was created in the months after Katrina. But money was disbursed based on the appraised value of a home rather than the cost of rebuilding, even though a home in a white community was typically appraised at a far higher price than the same house in a black community. Five years after the storm, a federal judge sided with black homeowners in a racial discrimination suit against the program. But by then officials had already spent more than 98 percent of the $13 billion that the federal government had committed to Road Home.

Katrina was not an equal opportunity storm.

The irony—the tragedy—is that despite the efforts of people like Jimmy Reiss to make New Orleans a less poor city, something like the opposite has happened. The child poverty rate in New Orleans is now 40 percent—that’s higher than it was before the storm, and more than double the national average. The income disparity between rich and poor is so great that last year Bloomberg declared New Orleans the country’s most “unequal” city. And it’s hardly just the poor who are suffering. The median black household in New Orleans in 2013 was $30,000—$5,000 less than it was in 2000, adjusted for inflation. By contrast, median household income in the white community increased by 40 percent over that same period and now stands at more than $60,000.  The same young energy that is helping rejuvenate urban communities across the country is part of the New Orleans story. But that just calls into greater relief those who have been left behind during recent prosperity.

These days, little recovery money is still coming to New Orleans. It might be a flood that explains the sorry state of so many of the city’s working and middle class communities, but New Orleans today is in the same boat as any city that has suffered blight and other ills due to the subprime meltdown and the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. The answer to this widespread suffering is a comprehensive urban plan—one that helps any metropolis with struggling neighborhoods that haven’t benefited from a general uptick in the fortune of the nation’s cities. But, of course, few in power are talking about anything so ambitious.

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What Baton Rouge Can Learn from New Orleans About Bringing Flood Victims Home https://talkpoverty.org/2016/08/25/baton-rouge-can-learn-new-orleans-bringing-flood-victims-home/ Thu, 25 Aug 2016 13:14:16 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=17155 In the wake of the nation’s worst natural disaster since Superstorm Sandy, flood recovery efforts are now underway in Baton Rouge: Electricity is operating in certain neighborhoods, damaged floors and walls are being removed from homes, and homeowners are beginning to deal with emergency assistance and insurance—or a lack thereof.

Soon, another aftereffect of the storm will sweep Baton Rouge communities: climate refugees—people who are displaced by climate change or natural disasters—will begin the daunting task of rebuilding their lives.

Louisianans are painfully familiar with this concept. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina displaced approximately 1.5 million people from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  It was the second largest climate-driven exodus in US history—only the Dust Bowl exodus was larger. Roughly 40% of the people who fled the storm were unable to return to their pre-Katrina homes—and this burden was not shared evenly.

Evacuees who didn’t return to their home states were more likely to come from a lower-income household, or be unemployed, than their counterparts who did return home. Poorer New Orleans residents may have been forced to move further away, as indicated by cities as far as Philadelphia providing refuge for homeless Katrina victims, but distance wasn’t the only obstacle. The slow return of low-income housing—eight years after the storm, New Orleans still had less than half the number of pre-storm public housing units—kept the city’s disadvantaged population scattered at best and homeless at worst.

In addition to struggles with housing, poorer communities were also likely to suffer from pollution-linked physical health impacts, which are exacerbated by higher levels of psychological trauma and stress after an event like Hurricane Katrina. One study found that low-income Katrina survivors were twice as likely to suffer poor mental health outcomes as people with greater financial resources, and another noted that people who did not return to their communities had greater levels of depression than those who were able to return home.

The thousands of Baton Rouge area residents affected by this historic flooding will face the same struggle to return home that Katrina survivors experienced. Many of these survivors were already living in poverty before the floods hit. Of the 20 parishes that President Obama declared “a major disaster,” 17 had populations above the 14.8% national poverty rate, and half of the disaster-declared parishes had more people living in poverty than the state poverty average of 19.8%. Two affected parishes, St. Landry and Washington, had poverty rates near 30%.

Without efforts to bring residents of all income levels back home, the health and economic welfare of many low-income residents will likely worsen.

Leaders in the public, private, and non-profit sectors need to offer pathways home that can improve the lives of these residents and strengthen their communities.  This includes programs developed after Hurricane Sandy to shelter residents in their homes as quickly as possible, such as the Rapid Repairs program, and rental assistance for low-income households. Policies that identify and strengthen community organizations serving residents can also help people find assistance and shelter in a nearby community. Rehoming residents after an extreme weather event will also mitigate some of the exclusionary impacts of gentrification, which has been a contentious issue in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina.

Government officials seemingly recognize the need to bring residents back to their communities by trying to make their homes habitable as quickly as possible. Whether these efforts will extend to low-income residents this time around remains to be seen.

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How the Next President Can Help High-Poverty Neighborhoods https://talkpoverty.org/2016/06/06/next-president-can-help-high-poverty-neighborhoods/ Mon, 06 Jun 2016 12:10:15 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=16503 Between 2000 and 2013, the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods—where more than 40 percent of residents lived below the poverty line—nearly doubled. As of 2013, 13.8 million people lived in these impoverished neighborhoods, the highest figure ever recorded.

High-poverty neighborhoods are characterized by inferior housing, higher levels of pollution, underfunded schools, inadequate public infrastructure, and few employment opportunities—realities that carry significant consequences. A growing body of research shows that concentrated poverty undermines the long-term success of children and even lowers life expectancy. What’s more, despite the fact that most low-income people in the United States are white, people of color are much more likely to live in impoverished areas due to the enduring effects of segregation and ongoing discriminatory housing practices.

Historically, federal programs have prescribed a one-size-fits-all approach to address concentrated poverty, with a focus on housing. But it has become increasingly apparent that what’s needed is a more comprehensive approach—one that addresses the interrelated challenges faced by low-income people in high-poverty neighborhoods, alongside efforts to move some residents out of concentrated poverty. A Harvard study found that if a person moves to a low-poverty area as a child, he or she will be more likely to go to college and will see an increase in total lifetime earnings of roughly $302,000. While policies that enable low-income people to live in more prosperous communities, such as housing vouchers, are critical, leaders must address the challenges facing the many people who remain in underserved communities.

President Obama has taken note. When he took office in 2009, his administration set out to ensure that the federal government was supporting local innovation rather than dictating community development strategies, and established programs to help local leaders address modern realities such as changes in technology, aging infrastructure, and jobs moving to the suburbs and abroad. These efforts culminated in the announcement of the Promise Zones initiative in 2014, in which Obama declared, “A child’s course in life should be determined not by the zip code she’s born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams.”

Today, the Obama Administration announced the third and final round of Promise Zone designees, which include communities in Nashville, southern Los Angeles, Atlanta, Evansville, Indiana, San Diego, eastern Puerto Rico and southwest Florida. In addition, the Spokane Indian Reservation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians also received the Promise Zone designation.

Designees will receive priority access to existing federal resources to help them implement their comprehensive plans to support job creation, increase economic security, expand educational opportunities, increase access to affordable housing, and improve public safety. In addition, new zones will receive AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers to help build capacity on the ground.

Over the course of just two years, the Promise Zone designation has proven to be an effective strategy for bringing local stakeholders together around shared goals, and for streamlining the relationship between local and federal leaders. For example, the designation has allowed the Los Angeles Promise Zone, one of the first cities selected, to leverage millions of dollars in grants across 14 agencies to support its work.

But with a new presidency on the horizon, the Promise Zones initiative could end with this administration.

The Los Angeles Zone, which includes parts of Hollywood, is one of the densest and most diverse parts of the city, but is also one of the poorest. As a result of the initiative, the zone is utilizing federal support to transform its 45 different schools into “community schools”—providing full-time nonprofit staff to work with parents, coordinate resources, and provide workshops and wellness classes for students and parents alike. In addition, the school district is placing its own staff in job training centers, youth centers, and family centers to ensure coordination of resources throughout the zone. According to Dixon Slingerland, Executive Director of the Youth Policy Institute and a leader in the zone, “We believe anywhere a family goes in the zone should be a one stop shop. It shouldn’t be that we need to send them to all these different agencies. Wherever they go, we’re going to make sure we have all the pieces in place to support them.”

To be sure, in a world of limited resources, targeting funding to high-poverty communities means fewer resources will be directed to less disadvantaged communities that still face many of the same challenges. However, the goal of the initiative is not only to transform the selected zones—it’s also to change how the federal government works with local communities overall, while demonstrating effective and efficient strategies that other communities can adapt.

Such values should appeal to leaders across the political spectrum. After Eastern Kentucky was selected as a Promise Zone during the first round, Congressman Hal Rogers (R-KY) released a press release praising the initiative stating, “This program shows promise for recruiting private industry in several of our hard-hit counties.”

But with a new presidency on the horizon, the Promise Zones initiative could end with this administration. The progress that has been made in just two years through this initiative must be built upon to ensure such efficiency and effectiveness becomes business as usual for how the federal government works with local communities. To be sure, the Promise Zones initiative is not a substitute for a comprehensive plan to address poverty, which would require paid sick leave legislation, raising the minimum wage, protecting unemployment insurance, among other proven strategies. But when it comes to addressing the unique challenges of high poverty communities, the next president should take the lessons from the Obama administration and include this initiative in their governing agenda. Unprecedented levels of concentrated poverty require long-term strategies that cannot end in just a few months.

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A Real Agenda to Cut Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2016/04/22/real-agenda-to-cut-poverty/ Fri, 22 Apr 2016 18:33:17 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=15768 This article originally appeared on Real Clear Policy.

The American Dream is premised on the idea that the circumstances of your birth should not determine how far you can rise. Yet a growing body of research shows that a child’s ZIP code too often limits her life chances, with factors such as failing schools, dangerous streets, lack of quality jobs, and a dearth of community resources coming together to perpetuate poverty. And a new report suggests even more bad news for the American Dream: As it turns out, where you live isn’t just correlated with how high up the ladder you can climb; it also helps to determine the point at which you fall off altogether.

Multiple studies have confirmed that the rich typically live longer than those in struggling families, and that this gap is growing. A new study from Raj Chetty and his colleagues underscores that this gap is unconscionable, with nearly 15 years’ difference in life expectancy between the richest and poorest American men and over 10 years’ difference for American women. But the study reveals something new as well: that the gap is place-based, with significant differences in life expectancy among lower-income individuals based on where they live.

Among the top 100 commuting zones, poor individuals had longer life expectancies in wealthier areas with more educated individuals. A poor person in New York City, for example, is expected to live years longer than a person with the same income in Detroit. In other words, there are not just “two Americas” — the rich and the rest of us — but also dozens and dozens of Americas on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, with policy choices dramatically shaping not just quality of life but also the length of it.

Where you live isn't just correlated with how high up the ladder you can climb; it also helps to determine the point at which you fall off altogether.

These disturbing findings come out as issues of poverty, inequality, and mobility have taken center stage in the political conversation. Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Tim Scott recently held a GOP “poverty summit” in South Carolina. Further, the speaker has indicated that later this spring, House Republicans will be releasing a “white paper” synthesizing their ideas to cut poverty.

But if past is prologue, many of the House’s recommendations will be a recipe to exacerbate and perpetuate the disparities that Chetty’s study unearthed. First, under the Republicans’ budget blueprint, struggling families would suffer no matter where they live. The recently proposed House budget protects tax cuts for millionaires while deriving more than three-fifths of its cuts from programs that help low- and moderate-income people — programs that have cut the nation’s poverty rate nearly in half.

But it gets worse. The solutions favored by conservatives have typically been to consolidate and flat-fund federal programs that are currently helping struggling families, and to send these programs to the states. There have been many euphemisms for this policy over time: block grants, “empowering local communities,” “increased flexibility,” and, most recently, Speaker Ryan’s “opportunity grants.” But new packaging doesn’t change the reality. Block-granting and sending low-income programs to the states has historically resulted in deep cuts to core assistance programs, the inability of programs to respond when hardship rises during recessions, and wildly different access to help based on where one lives.

One example is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program, or TANF. In 1996, the federal guarantee of income assistance was sent to the states as a flat-funded block grant. Since that time, the value of the block grant has declined by nearly one-third, and the share of eligible families able to turn to income assistance has dramatically fallen. During the Great Recession, as unemployment and poverty were rising, some states tried to help as many families as possible, whereas other states put up new barriers that resulted in fewer struggling families having access to help.

Now conservatives are proposing to do the same thing to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, our nation’s most important defense against hunger. SNAP not only kept 10 million people from falling into poverty last year, but the program actually boosts long-term outcomes for children, including their health as adults.

Wildly varying programs at the state level isn’t limited to TANF. Many states do not have a stellar record when it comes to acting in the best interest of their low-income citizens. Nineteen states have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving 4 million Americans without health insurance. “Flint” is a one-word reminder of how unresponsive states can be to disadvantaged groups that lack political power. And while conservatives trumpet the importance of flexibility and local control, many conservative states have passed policies to “preempt” more progressive localities from implementing measures that help families, such as raising their cities’ minimum wage or passing paid-sick-days legislation so that parents don’t lose needed income or their job if the school nurse calls them to come pick up their sick child.

As candidates and lawmakers debate solutions to address poverty and mobility, the last thing we need are policies that replicate and perpetuate the geographic disparities that leave a struggling worker in Texas with no access to health insurance while his counterpart in California can access Medicaid.

Instead, we should build off of the momentum in states and localities that are alleviating poverty and investing in families, which, not coincidentally, can also significantly reduce the chronic stress associated with a wide variety of illness affecting life expectancy. As noted by the Washington Post in its coverage of the Chetty study, “Among the 100 largest commuting zones ranked by the researchers, six of the top eight for low-income life expectancies are in California” — a state that has pursued many policies that mitigate the stresses associated with poverty, such as paid parental leave, a higher minimum wage, and investments in early care and education.

A serious agenda to cut poverty and promote economic opportunity would include these policies and more, investing in job creation, expanding access to high-quality childcare, and increasing opportunities for post-secondary education and training. It would help families manage work and caregiving through paid family leave and fair, flexible, and predictable work schedules; it would protect and strengthen the safety net, which is currently reducing poverty by nearly half. Finally, it would invest in high-poverty neighborhoods, as well as remove barriers to opportunity for Americans with criminal records.

There are many reasons for lawmakers and candidates to embrace these policies, not least of which is that they are very popular with Americans across the political spectrum. But Chetty and his colleagues have now given us one more important reason to reject the failed conservative proposals and instead make needed investments to cut poverty and boost opportunity.

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The Evolving Fight Against Concentrated Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2016/03/18/evolving-fight-against-concentrated-poverty/ https://talkpoverty.org/2016/03/18/evolving-fight-against-concentrated-poverty/#comments Fri, 18 Mar 2016 12:46:33 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=14696 Since the early 1960s and the civil rights movement, when urban concentrated poverty began to enter public consciousness, policymakers and neighborhood activists have pursued place-based anti-poverty work in distinct ways.  Back then it proved difficult to address the multiplicity of issues that exist when so many people with low incomes all live in the same zip code. Today, it remains a difficult task—maybe even more so—given the disappearance of good manufacturing jobs, increased concentration of wealth, and political gridlock.  Our country remains stubbornly segregated, and especially given how intertwined race and poverty are, it remains vitally important to focus on place.

Fortunately, we’ve had some new thinking on this front during the last eight years and I am guardedly optimistic that we are moving towards solutions.

I am guardedly optimistic that we are moving towards solutions.

Building on the work of social entrepreneur Geoffrey Canada, President Obama succeeded in funding the Promise Neighborhoods program centered on children in schools and, by extension, on their families. The initiative aims to improve educational and development outcomes for students living in urban and rural communities by providing cradle-to-career educational programs and family supports.  Beyond the importance of the initiative itself is the fact that it opened the door to new approaches to fighting poverty. If a neighborhood revitalization initiative could be anchored in schools instead of the traditional focus on housing and community development, other hubs could serve the same purpose—including community health centers, or early childhood or mental health facilities, or a variety of family services locations.

This past year I visited four places to look at some of the cutting-edge work focused on poverty and place.  The diversity of their theories of change is impressive, and all of them should be on our collective radar as we move into a new presidency.

Minneapolis, Northside Achievement Zone

I started in Minneapolis where I grew up.  The city is perplexing.  While it has a very low overall unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, the African-American poverty rate hovers over 44 percent and the  African-American unemployment rate is about 14 percent (compared to 8.8 percent nationwide).

I visited the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), a Promise Neighborhood composed of a 13-by-18 block segment of North Minneapolis that is 84 percent African-American, with poverty above 50 percent, unemployment concomitantly high, and extensive violence.

NAZ was founded in 2011 with a mission to improve educational outcomes for children, including through parental involvement and a commitment to good housing, employment, and community safety.  The heart of NAZ’s modus operandi is “connectors” and “navigators.” Connectors visit families in their homes and then connect them with the help they need.  The connector brings the issue that a NAZ family is struggling with to a navigator who is a specialist in the relevant area—whether it’s related to education, parenting, child care, housing, or some other challenge.

NAZ works with partners of all kinds – including neighborhood-based organizations, businesses, education groups, and philanthropic organizations.  In all, it has 43 ongoing partners and dozens more that it partners with when there is a specific need. It’s too early to draw any conclusions beyond the fact that NAZ’s work is promising, but if there is a second generation of Promise Neighborhoods—and I hope there is—we should keep an eye on NAZ and the work of connectors and navigators.

Chicago, Logan Square Neighborhood Association

The next stop for me was the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) in Chicago, in business since 1962.  Originally, the LSNA served mostly Polish Americans, but today it primarily serves Latino families.  The LSNA engages its people in legislative advocacy and does a lot of community building as well.  Its long list of activities includes: affordable housing and foreclosure prevention, education programs for children and adults, investing in green development, and addressing immigration issues, among others.  There is no one place to find money for all of that work, so the LSNA stitches together its budget from dozens of sources—government at all levels, philanthropic, corporate, and individual.

I visited LSNA because of its parent mentor program, which operates in nine local public schools and directly impacts more than 3,800 students.  LSNA recruits parents (usually immigrants) of children in kindergarten to come to school as semi-volunteers—they receive a small stipend at the end of each semester.  The parents are nurtured into mentor roles, including by obtaining a GED.  Finally, they graduate to employment—at LSNA, the school where they volunteered, or elsewhere—or they further their education.  The women involved in the program successfully lobbied the state legislature for an appropriation.  That’s good stuff.  Put it on the agenda for national attention.

Los Angeles, Youth Policy Institute

The third stop was the Youth Policy Institute (YPI) in Los Angeles.  This one is special for me because its CEO, Dixon Slingerland, worked for Robert Kennedy’s dear friend (and mine), David Hackett.  Among other things, Hackett founded YPI and helped establish what we now know as AmeriCorps Vista.  When he retired in 1996, Hackett passed the mantle to Slingerland.  He died about 5 years ago, and I know he would be very proud of the work YPI is doing today.

You have to catch your breath at the size of what Slingerland and his colleagues have built.  YPI’s budget has grown to $57 million.  It has 1,600 staff serving more than 100,000 youth and adults at 125 program sites.  YPI is the lead agency for a Promise Neighborhood, a Byrne Criminal Justice grantee (to reduce neighborhood crime and increase safety), and a lead partner for a Promise Zone.  It operates five schools of its own and partners with 90 more, 83 public computer centers, and runs afterschool programs at 78 schools.

YPI is an example of what the nonprofit sector can do by marshaling public and private funding to help children and families at scale.  I visited two of YPI’s non-school sites and talked to many staff members and even more consumers of the products.  They serve children ranging from early Head Start, to older students in after school and gang prevention programs.  They also offer teen pregnancy prevention, job readiness, and job placement services.  YPI works with families on parenting skills, financial planning, and computer literacy.  They help day laborers and teach community agriculture.  Nonetheless, Dixon is very clear that for all the help YPI extends to individual children, youth, and families, the strategic point is to change things on a large scale as well.  I think the lesson here is that YPI and similar organizations must have public and private investment for what they do, and that their ultimate goal is to move the needle on poverty.

New Haven, MOMS Partnership

Finally, I visited New Haven and the New Haven Mental Health Outreach for Mothers (MOMS) Partnership, an innovative collaboration of city agencies and institutions that was spearheaded by Megan Smith, a faculty member of the Yale School of Medicine.  This is a relatively young endeavor but it has already received national attention and funding from the university, foundations, the state of Connecticut, and the federal government.

The exciting thing about the MOMS Partnership is its focus on mental health.  The entry point to get women involved is by addressing the extra stress that comes with living in poverty and near poverty.  With decentralized locations in the community, Smith’s staff—who are themselves mostly residents in low-income neighborhoods—do outreach to their neighbors and offer an 8-week stress management course to address chronic and toxic stress.  Participants also have the opportunity to take skill-building and job readiness classes.  The MOMS Partnership is currently branching out, and is especially expanding its effort to help participants find employment or job training.

These four diverse initiatives are representative of innovation that is occurring throughout the country.  Attacking the many issues that confront people who live in low-income neighborhoods is a longtime challenge.  It is vital that we support these and other efforts so we achieve a scale large enough to make a measureable difference in the fight against poverty in America.

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Segregation in the Era of Housing ‘Choice’ https://talkpoverty.org/2016/03/14/segregation-era-housing-choice/ Mon, 14 Mar 2016 12:39:00 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=14633 A few months before I met Vivian Warner,* she got the call she had been waiting so long for that she’d forgotten to hope for it. It was Baltimore Housing, the agency that oversees subsidized housing in the city. After four years on the waitlist, Vivian would receive a housing voucher, and could finally move off of her sister’s couch into her own home. A few weeks later, Vivian boarded a bus with the other lucky winners and drove around the city to visit eligible homes. At the last stop, the bus pulled up in front of a low-rise apartment complex. It was not quite what Vivian had imagined, but there was a two-bedroom available, and Vivian would pay just $55 a month out of pocket from her part-time income. She signed the lease that afternoon.

The housing voucher Vivian waited years to receive is part of the federal government’s most recent attempt to house the poor. Since the 1930s, it has employed housing assistance as a key tool in its war on urban blight and poverty. But these attempts have often failed those whom they were meant to protect, at times recreating the very inequality they intended to undo.

These attempts have often failed those whom they were meant to protect.

Post-war, the Federal Housing Administration underwrote home loans for millions of white Americans, while banks systematically denied them to black families, a process called redlining. Even in federally funded public housing, the poor had no respite from the marginalizing forces of inequality. In the 1950s and ‘60s, high-rise public housing was erected in neighborhoods that already suffered from segregation, underinvestment, and decline. And when the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed housing discrimination by “race or national origin,” local housing authorities in cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Dallas continued to keep two separate housing lists: one for whites, and one for blacks.

Vivian is part of a generation of poor urban dwellers who left the concentrated poverty of high-rise public housing towers, which by the 1990s were crumbling from neglect. Across the country the buildings were torn down, and along with them an entire system for housing the poor was dismantled.  In the place of public housing, the federal government needed a new solution, one that would remedy the concentrated poverty and segregation it had helped to create.

This solution expanded an existing program relying on the private market to house the poor: housing vouchers. These vouchers make up the difference between what a needy household can afford and the cost of a unit in the private market. They are meant to allow families to rent in any affordable neighborhood, offering men and women like Vivian their very first chance to choose where to live. Today, of the five million households across the country receiving some form of federal housing assistance, over half now live in privately owned properties, many through the Housing Choice Voucher program, previously called Section 8.

The program has undeniably positive effects. Vivian was able to regain custody of her twin boys thanks to her new home. For Tony Young, a 55-year-old man with HIV, receiving a voucher meant relief from the cold, hard bed under the bridge where he slept when there was no room at the homeless shelter. Joann Jones, a young mother of two, was able to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for her seven-year-old at the local store while he attended a high-performing public school nearby. The basic economic relief that vouchers provide cannot be understated. And they also give families something more: flexibility in times of crisis to respond to the demands of their jobs, their children’s needs, even the whims of landlords. By letting recipients choose where to live, vouchers confer dignity and affirm a sense of belonging potentially free from the stigma of “public” housing. Most importantly, they may help people to realize their dreams of a place to call home.

By untethering federal housing aid from the disadvantaged neighborhoods to which it was once attached, vouchers offer millions of poor Americans the opportunity to move to a new neighborhood where streets are safe, schools have resources to teach their children, and jobs are bountiful. But not everyone does. Vivian, for example, might have used her voucher in a number of safer, more affluent neighborhoods. But time and resources to find an ideal home are limited. And America’s long history of discriminatory housing practices have shaped the residential landscape in ways that cannot be undone by simply offering families a “choice.” Though voucher holders have moved to areas that are less poor than the ones available in the heyday of public housing, many are re-concentrating in poor neighborhoods.

This re-concentration matters for a reason that social scientists like William Julius Wilson have long known to be a social fact, but finally have the hard numbers to prove: where you live matters. It matters for your quality of life, for how much money you make in your lifetime, and for your children. Raj Chetty’s new work shows that a child growing up in a city like Baltimore will make 14 percent less over his lifetime than one in a typical American county, even after accounting for individual factors like income and education.

Vouchers fail to take account of an important lesson: A roof is not enough.

If where you live is so crucial, then we ought to pay attention to the role housing policy plays in where families end up. In a landmark case this past July, the Supreme Court ruled that housing discrimination need not be intentional to have harmful effects of segregation. This is the first time the legal concept of “disparate impact”—the idea that a policy may disproportionately affect certain groups even absent injurious intent—was applied to federal housing policy. The decision substantiates an important change in the way discrimination persists in contemporary America: we are moving away from the overt racism of Jim Crow, toward one maintained by enduring institutions that inadvertently perpetuate longstanding inequalities—a “racism without racists.” This shift is crucial to understanding how and why racial inequality continues to plague our nation.

Housing vouchers offer a chance to remedy this disparity, but are not yet equipped to fully do so. Not all voucher holders succeed in finding a place to live, and those who do are often unable to find homes in neighborhoods that have jobs and good schools. And although vouchers are a potential tool to dismantle concentrated poverty and segregation, it turns outs that black voucher holders live in neighborhoods that are poorer and far more segregated than those of white voucher holders, revealing the program’s shockingly disparate impact on white and black families. If black voucher holders face obstacles that prevent them from using their vouchers in the same neighborhoods as whites, then something needs to be done.

In their current form, vouchers fail to take account of an important lesson: A roof is not enough. Where you live matters. Vouchers shouldn’t merely keep people off the streets; they should help families move to neighborhoods with more opportunities. What can we do then to make the voucher program work better to reduce inequality? There are a number of policy fixes to reduce barriers that prevent families from using their voucher in low-poverty, integrated neighborhoods. For example, we could do a better job providing mobility counseling and transportation to help families explore new neighborhoods. There are also solutions related to landlords, like passing national legislation that makes it illegal to discriminate against someone who pays their rent with a voucher, and other policies that would encourage landlords in low-poverty areas to accept housing vouchers.

It is not enough to simply move the poor out of poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

Even with these fixes to modify the disparate impact vouchers often have, it is not enough to simply move the poor out of poverty-stricken neighborhoods. It is imperative that we address the root causes of poverty and inequality by implementing change at the level of the neighborhood itself, improving the environments around poor families by investing in schools, institutions, and the economy. But this systemic transformation cannot take place overnight, and it will face stark political opposition. It remains to be seen how the political climate of the next presidency will unfold to potentially make good on the Fair Housing Act’s recently renewed half-a-century old promise to “affirmatively further fair housing.”

While we wait for political change, we can act to undo the disparate impact this program has on minority families, who don’t fully reap its rewards. Housing vouchers could be a powerful instrument to remedy the indelible dangers of living in a poor environment, for families of all backgrounds.

*Name has been changed to protect confidentiality

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Why Achieving the American Dream Depends on Your Zip Code https://talkpoverty.org/2015/12/17/american-dream-zip-codes-affordable-housing/ Thu, 17 Dec 2015 14:32:16 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=10577 Today, the state of the American Dream—the ability of anyone to work hard and get ahead—largely depends on one’s zip code. That is more than a little troubling, given that 97 percent of Americans believe everyone should have an equal shot at success.

As President Obama put it earlier this year: “In this country, of all countries, a person’s zip code shouldn’t decide their destiny.”

But what makes this trend even more problematic, as a new Center for American Progress report indicates, is that now—due to a lack of affordable housing and enduring patterns of residential segregation—the zip code where people live is largely determined by income, race, and ethnicity.

The report’s co-authors suggest that if we want to change this unacceptable status quo we need to work on two fronts: reinvest in impoverished neighborhoods so that residents have access to high-quality housing, jobs, good schools, transportation, and other basics; and ensure that families with low-incomes have access to affordable housing in neighborhoods that already offer residents these resources.

For low-income renters, the affordable housing situation is now a crisis. As Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro said at the release of the report: “This issue of an affordability crisis on the rental market is real, in big cities and in small towns.”

Indeed, half of all renters in the U.S. spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing (above the threshold commonly defined as “affordable”); and more than a quarter spend over 50 percent of their income. On top of that, the housing that is available is increasingly limited to high-poverty, low-opportunity neighborhoods: 13.8 million Americans now live in neighborhoods where more than 40 percent of residents are poor, nearly double the number of people in 2000.

When low-income families are able to move to neighborhoods that foster mobility, the benefits are clear: the children perform much better academically than their peers in high-poverty neighborhoods; their average annual earnings as adults increase by 31 percent; they are more likely to attend college and less likely to become single parents. There is also marked improvement in physical and mental health, particularly for adults and girls.

Quanda Burrell, 30, lives with her 10-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son in Boston where she works full-time as a childcare teacher for infants. She grew up in low-income communities, where there was a lot of drug and gang activity and shootings.

When she was pregnant with her first child, she was couch-surfing with friends and relatives, and briefly lived in two homeless shelters. She then moved to privately-owned, subsidized housing in a mixed-income neighborhood.

“The neighborhood was primarily Caucasian, and quiet,” Burrell said. “That took getting used to.”

Her children haven’t had to face the stressors Burrell dealt with—like how to cross rival gang territories in order to walk to the park; getting robbed at gunpoint when walking home from work during high school; or needing to stay inside of the house “for safety reasons.” Her family has also enjoyed quality childcare and schools, and easy access to services like WIC, a food pantry, and a diaper bank when they have needed help.

“But the number one difference is safety,” she said.

In order to help more low-income families move to high-opportunity neighborhoods, the report recommends establishing a federal law that would prohibit landlords from refusing tenants just because they possess a housing voucher. Additionally, the authors call for the elimination of exclusionary zoning—“ranging from density limits and minimum lot size requirements to community vetoes of new construction”—which limit affordable housing construction and increase racial and economic segregation.

But not every family is going to be able to move to a high-opportunity neighborhood (nor does every family want to relocate), which is why we need to revitalize distressed communities as well.

Secretary Castro and the report’s co-authors point to the Obama Administration’s Promise Zone model as one way to do that. The initiative aims to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies that break siloes—so that people working on issues ranging from housing, transportation, job training, health equity, youth employment, and more—are working collaboratively towards solutions that connect these issues. There is also technical assistance to help the zones access federal funding and other resources.

“I believe that ultimately more local communities [will] put this kind of thinking into action, and challenge the state and federal government to do the same,” said Secretary Castro.

Whether families remain in distressed neighborhoods or move to more affluent ones, a big part of the solution lies in increasing the overall supply of affordable housing. Currently, for every 100 households earning below 30 percent of the area median income, there are just 28 affordable and available units. That adds up to a shortage of 4.5 million units just for those very low-income households.

If our priorities weren’t so skewed to benefit affluent homeowners, an increase in our affordable housing stock might be more easily achieved. As the report notes, “More than 75 percent of federal housing expenditures support homeownership. More than half of these…benefit high-income households earning more than $100,000 per year.” In all, we spend nearly three times more on subsidizing homeownership than we do on rental assistance. It should come as no surprise then that only 1 in 4 households eligible for federal rental assistance actually receives it.

This trend could easily get worse before it gets better.

If our priorities weren’t so skewed to benefit affluent homeowners, an increase in our affordable housing stock might be more easily achieved

According to the authors, 2.1 million units of subsidized affordable housing are at risk over the next 10 years as rent restrictions expire and landlords look to cash in. It is critical that states and cities pass laws that give tenants, local agencies, and non-profits opportunities to purchase these units from private landlords. “Opportunity to purchase” laws have proven most effective where there are entities committed to affordable housing, including “local housing agencies, legal aid clinics…and mission-oriented non-profits that specialize in preservation transactions.”

The report co-authors also suggest that we could do a better job increasing the supply of affordable housing through tax policy. For example, they argue that we need to expand and better target the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), which in the past 30 years has preserved more than 2.7 million affordable units and leveraged more than $100 billion in private capital. The LIHTC program offers significant tax credits to participants who “agree to keep the units affordable to very low-income tenants for a period of at least 30 years.” We also need to allocate these credits based on where the need for affordable housing is greatest, rather than the current approach of making the determination based on a state’s population.

Finally, we need to promote mobility and access to more affordable units by better funding the voucher program. The authors note that “while the share of households that are spending unsustainable portions of the income on rent has grown, the number of households that are receiving rental assistance has remained flat.” In fact, sequestration alone resulted in 70,000 fewer families receiving vouchers.

There is no question that these reforms and the many others outlined in the report would dramatically increase affordable housing in our nation and move us closer to our ideal that “anyone can rise.” The question—and it’s always the question when it comes to poverty and opportunity in America—is how do we create the political will to make it happen?

Burrell believes low-income people speaking out is key.

“A lot of people say that the political leaders in the statehouse don’t care about them,” she said. “But you got to make them care. You got to visit them, speak out. If more low-income folks were talking, I think that would make a difference.”

Secretary Castro seemed to largely agree, adding that the rental crisis is also harming the middle class.

“How do you mobilize folks to impress upon policymakers at all levels about the needs of different communities?” Secretary Castro asked. “I don’t see that conversation right now happening enough.”

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Stop Ignoring Residential Segregation and the Concentration of Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/2015/05/20/stop-ignoring-residential-segregation-concentration-poverty/ Wed, 20 May 2015 13:30:03 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=7176 Over the last two weeks, disturbing images of Baltimore’s civil unrest have flooded mainstream and social media.

For many, the images recall other past uprisings still fresh in our nation’s collective memory. Take Ferguson, or the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992, for example. Different locations, similar scenarios, and the usual suspect – police brutality against people of color. But the similarity between what has happened in Baltimore and in other places suggests an inconvenient truth: The unrest in Baltimore is not a sporadic accident. Rather, it is a dramatic example of what has gone wrong in our society for several decades—most notably, how we have failed to deal with residential segregation and the concentration of poverty which are the underlying causes of repeated unrest.

Despite the promises of the fair housing movement and subsequent policies addressing residential segregation and poverty concentration, each continues to persist in our inner-cities and has proliferated well into the suburbs. Current efforts to break up concentrations of poverty often involve the movement of families from high-poverty areas to more affluent neighborhoods through the administration of Housing Choice Vouchers. Although vouchers and the programs relying on them – like Moving to Opportunity – have yielded positive results for many families, moving families from high-poverty areas through vouchers cannot be our nation’s only answer to residential segregation.

First, such dispersal efforts face significant barriers due to political opposition and resistance from both displaced individuals and receiving communities. Leaving one’s neighborhood and support networks can represent a critical source of social and psychological hardship. In addition, vouchers are often difficult to use in low-poverty areas, due to the current shortage of affordable housing, some landlords’ reluctance to accept vouchers, and persistent housing discrimination. Therefore, the implementation of dispersal programs often risks re-concentrating the poor into low-income neighborhoods with very few opportunities.

The problems that inner cities face are structural – rooted in institutions that restrict the resources and opportunities

The primary reason we cannot rely on vouchers alone, however, is simple: the problems that inner cities face are structural – rooted in institutions that restrict the resources and opportunities that are available to residents. Baltimore’s civil unrest is not really just a reaction against police brutality. It is a cry for recognition and social justice from marginalized communities who do not have full access to basic rights – including the right to their city – because they are locked in areas of concentrated poverty. Baltimore should serve as a wake-up call for policy makers, practitioners and advocacy groups who – in spite of their good intentions – still operate in an un-coordinated fashion and in separate silos.

There is no doubt that the revitalization of inner-city neighborhoods through housing construction and redevelopment represents a critical step to alleviate poverty concentration. Brick and mortar approaches alone, however, will not solve the problem.

Several actions would ensure that there are opportunities for self-development available to people residing in areas of concentrated poverty, including: (1) encouraging the development of job training centers and social entrepreneurship in inner cities; (2) retaining and improving existing affordable housing and protecting it from speculative private development; (3) raising minimum wages and providing access to better paying jobs; (4) encouraging a sense of hope and ownership to marginalized groups – especially among youth – by providing people of different ages the opportunity to make planning decisions in their own neighborhoods and institutions; (5) fostering healthier neighborhoods – by improving access to high-quality food resources, expanding recreational opportunities, and increasing protection against environmental hazards like lead paint, hazardous waste repositories, and landfills that are disproportionately present in low-income communities.

We, as a society, ought to stop trying to fix the symptoms of poverty concentration and instead attack its causes. How many more LA’s, Katrinas, Fergusons, and Baltimores do we need before we stop pushing the replay button as if these events were just another spectacle to watch on cable?

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REACH: Stories of Black Men and the Communities that Shaped Them https://talkpoverty.org/2015/02/20/reach-stories-black-men-communities-shaped/ Fri, 20 Feb 2015 13:21:47 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=6334 Continued]]> After the killing of Michael Brown last summer, the nation’s attention turned towards Ferguson, Missouri – a small town with a history mirroring that of many communities across the country. Over a period of just a few decades, white residents largely disappeared from the town, concentrated poverty became rampant, and the criminal justice system has disproportionately targeted black residents. In the months after the shooting, the town became a central focus in the media’s narrative, revealing how decades of disinvestment and a history of racially biased policies enabled this tragedy. In short, where you live matters.

It is within this context that the new book, REACH: 40 Black Men Speak on Living, Leading, and Succeeding, must be understood.

Co-edited by former NAACP President Ben Jealous, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, the book celebrates black men through the personal essays of entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, philanthropists, and activists.  By chronicling each man’s path to success, the first person narratives in Reach also serves as a counterpoint to the negative images of black men that saturate the media.

One of the more subtle yet significant aspects of the book is how it reveals the critical role that communities play in the black experience. Contributors address everything from Jim Crow laws and the Great Migration to life in inner cities and current concerns over gentrification.

Derrick Johnson, State President of the Mississippi NAACP, captures some of the most seminal moments in the rise and fall of black communities when he writes: “The previous generation of my family had migrated to Detroit from the South in order to get good jobs in the auto industry, but after Reaganomics and the decline of the unions, those jobs went away.” He continues, “By the early 1980s, when I was coming up, it was drugs and poverty all around.”

Every contributor shares his unique story, and stitched together, they form a tapestry of the black experience in towns and cities across the country.

Success is determined by your zip code, by your race and ethnicity, and by your parents’ wealth status.

More importantly, the book reveals how the community you grow up in shapes your long-term life prospects. For example, Dr. Emmett D. Carson, CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, recalls an incident when a young man was shot outside of his Chicago home and his father came to the man’s aid. Shortly afterward, Carson and his family moved a short distance away for better opportunities.

“I had moved thirty blocks, and all of a sudden, everything was in front of me – I was told every opportunity could be mine if I worked for it,” he writes. “And yet I had friends and family in the old neighborhood who were not going to be exposed to the same opportunities.” He continues, “We don’t have a society where we can say that success is random. Success is determined by your zip code, by your race and ethnicity, and by your parents’ wealth status.”

Carson’s words summarize the consequences of living in concentrated poverty, and how the opportunity to live in a better area can change the trajectory of one’s life. In fact, research shows that a person’s zip code has more to do with their life expectancy than their genetic code. For instance, poverty has been shown to genetically age children, and exposure to neighborhood violence impairs cognitive ability. Further, living in high poverty communities often means having little or no access to services that many people take for granted. Shaka Senghor, Director of the Atonement Project at the University of Michigan, highlights this at the beginning of his powerful essay. After becoming a victim of gun violence, he explains, “I was bleeding profusely waiting for the ambulance as long as I could – you know, in the ‘hood, we have no expectations of the ambulance coming.” He goes on, “I was exposed to probably every horrific thing you can imagine in that environment.”

Given that Reach takes on the heavy burden of combating the negative images of black men that flood America’s collective conscious, it would be tempting to select stories of individuals with spotless backgrounds. Instead, Jealous and co-editor Trabian Shorters rightly include the stories of men who were tangled up in crime and violence, highlighting how their communities became fertile grounds for such destruction. As Yusef Shakur, CEO of YBS Consulting, writes of his own turn down the wrong path: “When we think of ‘undeveloped’ places, we tend to think of third world countries. But here in Detroit we have third world neighborhoods. These communities don’t have the nurturing influence of families, of strong businesses or strong churches. The mentality of the streets is filling those voids.”

Inclusion of these stories is significant as black men are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system. Due to structural racism and hyper-criminalization, black men are incarcerated at a rate six times higher than that of white men, and 49 percent of black men have been arrested by age 23. Not only is it important for young black men who may have criminal records to see that the paths to success are often winding, it is also critical for the public to understand the humanity of people who have borne the weight of handcuffs.

It would be easy to point to these stories as evidence that it is possible to “pull yourself up from your bootstraps,” but that interpretation entirely misses the important lesson of the book. We shouldn’t be satisfied with people succeeding despite the conditions of their communities; we want people to succeed because of them.

Reach serves as a reminder that there are children of color living in communities across the country who are still waiting on this nation’s promise of opportunity. Leaders must work together to right the wrongs of past policies that created these communities, and ensure that, as President Obama stated in announcing the Promise Zones Initiative, “A child’s course in life should be determined not by the zip code she’s born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams.”

 

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President’s Budget: Increasing Mobility and Opportunity for All https://talkpoverty.org/2015/02/02/presidents-budget-increasing-mobility-opportunity/ Mon, 02 Feb 2015 19:56:48 +0000 http://talkpoverty.org/?p=6193 Continued]]> In his State of the Union address, President Obama put a laser-like focus on “middle-class economics”, calling for policies that ensure every American has a fair shot at economic security. While the President may not have said the word “poverty” in his address, his FY2016 budget, released today, makes clear that “middle-class economics” must also expand the population of people to whom that term applies. Infused throughout the president’s budget are policies and proposals that would provide a smoother pathway for people struggling on the financial brink to not just find a bit of security, but to have a shot at climbing the economic ladder through policies to create good jobs, support strong and healthy families, update our social contract for the 21st century, and remove barriers that keep people trapped in poverty. We’ll review a few of the highlights below.

Good Jobs
Strong Families
21st Century Social Insurance
Removing Barriers to Opportunity

Good Jobs

The President calls for a new investments in infrastructure projects such as ports, bridges, and roads, which would create millions of new jobs that pay a living wage.

The budget also includes significant investments to prepare American workers for medium- and high-skills jobs, including $60 billion for the president’s historic proposal to make community college free for students who keep up their grades, as well as funding to ensure that Pell grants don’t erode with inflation. Other funding would allow a doubling of apprenticeships over 5 years, and a significant expansion of re-employment services, and other workforce development programs that serve low- and middle-income workers.

Importantly, the president’s proposal includes significant new funding to help some of the most disadvantaged workers in the labor market. The budget includes $3 billion for a “Connecting for Opportunity Initiative,” which would make summer and year-round job opportunities more widely available and offer competitive grants to create educational and workforce opportunities for at-risk youth. Recognizing that subsidized jobs are an important tool for helping disadvantaged workers, the president’s budget also redirects over half a billion dollars to a “Pathways to Jobs” initiative to help states partner with employers to create these positions. The budget provides additional funding for subsidized jobs under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

Finally, the “First in the World” program would fund evidence-based and promising practices to improve the likelihood that low-income students could complete degrees and have a better shot at medium- to high-skill jobs in today’s economy.

Strong Families

CAP’s recent report on family policy underscores that policies that strengthen the economic foundation of families are an important part of ensuring that all families are stable, healthy, and strong. To that end, the president’s budget includes several key initiatives to ensure that families don’t need to make choices between a needed paycheck and bonding with a new baby, or going to work without affordable and quality child care.

Specifically, the President’s budget includes a proposal that provides incentives for up to five states to adopt earned paid leave legislation so that the birth of a child or illness of a family member doesn’t send a family into an economic tailspin.

The President reiterates his commitment to providing preschool for all by providing matching funds to states that set up preschool programs, but also offers up a historic expansion of childcare assistance, tripling the maximum child and dependent care tax credit to $3,000 and enabling more families to claim it.

The proposal also includes substantial investments of $82 billion over 10 years in the Child Care and Development Fund to help states offer subsidized child care to low-wage working parents. This could boost the number of slots available by more than 1 million. The budget also increases investments in quality infant and toddler care by expanding access to the Early Head Start program and ensures that children in Head Start can access full-day, full-year programs, which helps parents to work and improves outcomes for kids. The president’s budget continues his commitment to evidence-based home visiting programs that provide professionals like social workers and nurses to pregnant women and new moms in order to help parents support their child’s healthy development. The funded programs have shown a range of positive outcomes including lower rates of depressive symptoms and stress for parents and higher grade point averages and graduation rates for the children in the long-term.

21st Century Social Insurance

Given that four out of five Americans will face at least a year of significant economic insecurity at some point during their working years—and half will experience three years or more—we must ensure that our social contract provides sufficient protection amid the ups and downs of life.

To that end, the President’s budget includes important investments to strengthen several key elements of our social insurance system. He proposes bold reforms to Unemployment Insurance to make it respond more effectively as a stabilizer during recessions; ensure that long-term unemployed workers get the assistance they need without Congress needing to extend benefits; and help individuals secure comparable jobs as quickly as possible through investments in vital re-employment services.

Additionally, while the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of our nation’s most effective antipoverty programs, it largely misses childless workers and noncustodial parents, who remain the only group the federal government taxes into poverty. The President’s budget would expand the EITC for these workers, while also making permanent the 2009 improvements to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit, currently set to expire in 2017.

Finally, the President’s budget includes a commitment to keeping our Social Security system strong for current and future generations. To that end, the President would rebalance the old-age and survivors’ fund and the disability insurance fund to put both on sound footing for the next 20 years and to prevent a shortfall in the disability fund. (Rebalancing is a routine step that has been taken 11 times in the past when either fund has faced a shortfall—and it is the only option available to avoid needless, across-the-board benefit cuts for millions of disability insurance beneficiaries—which is what would happen if Congress fails to act before the disability fund’s reserves are depleted in 2016). With his budget, the President is sending a clear message to Congress that it would be irresponsible to threaten the benefits of nearly 9 million disabled workers and 2 million spouses and children for the sake of Congressional politicking. The budget also proposes much-needed increases in administrative funding for the Social Security Administration to reduce the backlog in disability hearings, and mandatory funding to ensure that the agency can do critical program integrity work.

Removing barriers to opportunity 

As a recent CAP report highlights, one group that faces significant barriers to opportunity is the approximately 1 in 3 Americans who have some type of criminal record. To ensure meaningful access to second chances, the President proposes increased investment in programs that support successful reentry. For instance, the budget includes a doubling of the Second Chance Act Grant program, which provides funds to state and local agencies and nonprofit organizations that provide services to support reentry and reduce recidivism; significant increases in resources for Bureau of Prisons programs that support mental health treatment and residential reentry centers, and the establishment of a new program to maintain and strengthen familial bonds for incarcerated individuals with minor children.

Moreover, recognizing that an individual’s zip code should not determine his or her life chances, the President proposes important investments to tackle place-based and concentrated poverty, including an expansion of the Promise Zones initiative, which aims to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies while helping local leaders access federal funding. The President designated five Promise Zones in 2014, and will name another 15 by the end of 2016.

Additionally, the President’s budget includes several policies to ensure that workers with disabilities have a fair shot at employment and economic security. For instance, it provides demonstration authority and funding for key federal agencies to explore early intervention strategies to support workers with disabilities in remaining in the workforce, as well as incentives for states to better coordinate services.

**

Budgets are about choices. One important choice that cuts across all of the above themes is the president’s choice to reject the spending caps imposed by sequestration in his budget. These caps are due to re-emerge in the next fiscal year absent congressional action, which would have disastrous consequences for our economy and for families. Sequestration costs jobs and erodes funding for skills training; sequestration undermines family economic security by kicking children out of Head Start and child care slots; it hurts the most vulnerable by slashing programs such as affordable housing and nutrition aid for babies and toddlers; and it means fewer resources for investments in community development in distressed neighborhoods, second chances for ex-offenders, and other opportunity-boosting programs.

But the president’s budget isn’t just about damage control. It makes real investments in cutting poverty and boosting economic mobility. In fact, the study that launched the Half in Ten campaign several years ago showed that raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC and Child Tax Credit, and making childcare more broadly available to low-income families could cut poverty by 26% over 10 years. Those types of investments are all in this budget.

While a Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to adopt the president’s budget, there are opportunities for bipartisan movement—including on the EITC, subsidized jobs, and common-sense reforms to our criminal justice system. But even if Congress were to ignore the vast majority of the president’s budget blueprint, it is important for advocates to pay attention. Budgets are about choices, and the President’s budget underscores that we can achieve deficit reduction while making investments in key aspects of economic opportunity: good jobs, strong families, a 21st century social contract, and removing barriers to opportunity. The question is this: can we build the political will to make these choices happen?

 

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Fostering the Power of Universities and Hospitals for Community Change https://talkpoverty.org/2014/10/24/power-of-universities-and-hospitals-for-community-change/ Fri, 24 Oct 2014 14:00:58 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=5066 Continued]]> Communities across the country are recognizing the tremendous resources nonprofit anchor institutions—such as hospitals and universities—can provide as engines of inclusive and equitable economic development. Increasingly, cities—often led by Mayors—are launching comprehensive strategies to leverage these institutions to address challenging problems of unemployment, poverty, and disinvestment. In 2014, several cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans, have launched community building and job creation strategies that revolve around anchor institutions; and in Cleveland, a decade old collaboration of philanthropy, anchor institutions, and the municipal government continues to rebuild economies in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city.

The ongoing fiscal crisis at all levels of government is putting tremendous stress on local economic development efforts designed to create family-supporting living wage jobs, revitalize local economies, and bring back wealth to our communities. Through their procurement and investment practices, anchor institutions represent a new source of economic development financing, but their enormous potential is so far largely unrealized. Unfortunately, the federal government has been largely missing in action in terms of creating the right policies to support cities in harnessing the full economic might of their anchor institutions.

Nearly 20 years ago, Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter noted that urban university expenditures were nine times greater than spending on all federal urban job and business development programs combined. That number is surely much greater now.

Anchor institutions represent a new source of economic development financing, but their enormous potential is so far largely unrealized.

Today, universities, hospitals and other anchor institutions wield considerable economic power in a community. Hospitals and universities are responsible for more than $1 trillion of our nation’s $17 trillion economy (about 6% of GDP). In addition, these “eds and meds” control well over $500 billion of endowment investments and they employ roughly 8% of the national workforce.

Anchor institutions are place-based enterprises, firmly rooted in their locales. Other anchors include community foundations, cultural institutions such as museums and performing arts centers, and municipal governments. Typically, anchors tend to be nonprofit corporations. Because they are “sticky capital”—in contrast to for-profit corporations which may relocate for a variety of reasons, such as lower labor costs, more subsidies, fewer environmental regulations—anchors have an economic self-interest in helping to ensure that the communities in which they are based are safe, vibrant, and healthy.

A particular opportunity is presented by emerging institutional “buy local” strategies which drive anchor procurement and investment locally, substitute imports, and recirculate money two or three times in what economists call a “multiplier effect.”

In Cleveland, University Hospital’s “Vision 2010” initiative drove 92% of a $1.2 billion construction and procurement effort into the local and regional economy (at the height of the 2008-09 recession), benefiting more than 100 local minority- and female-owned businesses. In Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania has systematically shifted nearly $100 million of procurement annually into the distressed West Philadelphia neighborhoods adjacent to its campus. In southern Ohio, the University of Cincinnati has allocated more than 10% of its $1 billion endowment to local investments intended to stabilize and revitalize the city’s Uptown District. Finally, in Boston, Northeastern University has seeded an economic development fund with $2.5 million to enable local businesses to expand and hire more employees.

The latest innovation in the field involves mayors using the power of their office to develop and implement multi-anchor strategies aimed at strengthening local economies. In March 2014, World Business Chicago, a not-for-profit economic development organization chaired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, launched Chicago Anchors for a Strong Economy (CASE). The goal is clear: identify ways to connect the city’s anchor purchasing needs to local firms, thus producing a stronger and more integrated local economy. Earlier this year, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake launched the Baltimore City Anchor Plan (BCAP) which focuses on place-based opportunities to connect anchors and neighborhoods—particularly those that are disinvested and most in need of equitable development linked to employment for low-income residents. And in mid-September, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans launched the Economic Opportunity Strategy to “recruit, train and connect the hardest to employ to real jobs and match local businesses to strategic opportunities for growth.” Anchor institutions, among the city’s largest purchasers of goods and services, have been identified as key partners in the new strategy.

Many have imagined how much more powerful these local anchor-based economic development strategies could be if the federal government were to provide a policy framework that would encourage anchors to align their business practices (purchasing, investment, hiring) to explicitly benefit the communities which they call home. After all, the vast majority of anchors are quasi-public institutions that receive substantial taxpayer resources ranging from university research grants to hospital Medicare reimbursements, and, of course, generally do not pay taxes themselves. Shouldn’t the federal government provide greater encouragement to these beneficiaries of public funds?

In 2008, just as President Obama was taking office, the Anchor Institution Task Force (AITF), a consortium of universities engaged in community work (full disclosure: I sit on its steering committee) presented the incoming Administration with a set of specific policy recommendations, arguing that “the federal government can and should play a catalytic role in engaging anchor institutions in democratic partnerships with their communities, cities, and regions.”

These recommendations for federal action were based on a long history of governmental encouragement of both universities and hospitals in their civic roles. From the Land-Grant College Act of 1862 and the GI Bill and the formation of the National Science Foundation in the 1940s and 50s, to today’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act and its requirement that nonprofit hospitals file Community Health Needs Assessments with the IRS, the federal Government has helped shape the direction of higher education and health care in America.

It is past time for a new federal policy strategy to help cities leverage the economic might of their anchor institutions to benefit communities—particularly low- and moderate-income communities that have been marginalized by growing wealth inequality, low-wage work, and dwindling resources focused on their needs.

Editor’s note: A new report from CAP Senior Policy Analyst Tracey Ross explores strategies for how the federal government can encourage universities and hospitals to use their vast economic resources to increase community revitalization and economic growth.  Read it here

 

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4 Things Communities must do to become a Promise Zone https://talkpoverty.org/2014/09/19/to-become-a-promise-zone/ Fri, 19 Sep 2014 13:30:07 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=3722 Continued]]>

As the federal government invests in nutrition, health, education, and job-training programs that keep families out of poverty, complementary investments to strengthen high-poverty communities across the country are also important. Fortunately, over the past several years, the Obama administration has invested in low-income urban, rural, and tribal communities, and it increasingly understands what it takes to drive and support local innovation. Still, many local leaders are faced with the challenge of addressing some of the United States’ most complex social problems with limited resources at their disposal.

These high-poverty communities suffer from problems such as inferior housing and infrastructure, poor health outcomes, failing schools, and little to no economic opportunity. According to analysis by Center for American Progress experts, income inequality and low social mobility place a downward drag on national prosperity, underscoring how the strength of our communities is inextricably tied to the success of the United States as a whole. The Obama administration’s Promise Zones initiative understands this reality and strives to ensure that a child’s ZIP code does not determine the outcomes of his or her life. The initiative aims to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies and by helping local leaders navigate federal funding.

The strength of our communities is inextricably tied to the success of the United States as a whole

Today, the administration announced that it is receiving applications for the second round of Promise Zones designees. “As a former mayor of an urban Promise Zone community, I have a unique appreciation for the talent, passion and the vision that local leaders offer when working to turn their communities around,” said HUD Secretary Julián Castro. “Promise Zones are about giving folks who have been underserved for far too long the opportunity to build stronger neighborhoods and more prosperous lives. At HUD, we’re honored to give other communities the opportunity to transform their futures so this work can continue across the country.” The deadline for submitting Promise Zones applications is November 21, 2014.

The initiative launched in January 2014 with Promise Zones in San Antonio, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Los Angeles, California; southeastern Kentucky; and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

These neighborhoods received priority access to federal resources to support job creation; increase economic security; expand educational opportunities; increase access to quality, affordable housing; and improve public safety. The Obama administration also hopes to extend tax incentives to private businesses for hiring employees and investing in the zones.

Over the next two years, up to 15 more communities will be designated as Promise Zones, presenting an opportunity for public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic leaders to work more collaboratively with both one another and federal officials to leverage resources and invest in proven strategies. As leaders and groups come together to plan their Promise Zones applications, here are four key components of the program they should keep in mind.

1. Community-driven efforts

Promise Zones are place-based initiatives designed to support communities in the innovative work they are already doing. Local leaders drive the direction of the effort, while the federal government serves as a catalyst by providing critical resources, facilitating partnerships, and building capacity.

For example, community and business leaders in the Choctaw Nation will focus on investing in basic infrastructure, including water and sewer systems, which have been identified as a serious impediment to economic development. In Philadelphia, leaders from Drexel University will focus on improving education quality through professional development for teachers, college access and readiness for middle school and high school students, and parental engagement.

2. Comprehensive strategies

There is no silver-bullet policy to address the many challenges facing high-poverty communities. These communities need a comprehensive set of strategies that equip youth and adult residents with the skills they need to prosper—and that ensure opportunities for success in their neighborhoods.

That’s why the Promise Zones initiative offers designees priority access to a range of revitalization resources through the U.S. Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Agriculture, to name a few. Applicants should have a strong vision and a well-integrated strategy to achieve it. The initiative was inspired in part by examples such as the East Lake Foundation’s work to transform the East Lake community in Atlanta, Georgia—a high-poverty neighborhood that suffered from blight and crime. Local leaders developed a strategy to tackle poverty by jointly addressing housing, education, workforce development, and health services. Today, violent crime is down by 95 percent, families receiving public assistance have seen their incomes quadruple, and the neighborhood’s school is the top-performing elementary school in the city.

3. Outcomes at the systems level

The Obama administration is looking to support efforts aimed at community-wide outcomes—for example, improving the educational system that serves all students in a community, rather than a single program that helps a fraction of students. The goal of the Promise Zones initiative is to take systemic action, which requires stakeholders to create common goals, follow shared metrics, and redirect resources accordingly.

For example, the Los Angeles Promise Zone is tracking 23 different indicators at the individual, family, and household levels for 10 core outcomes, such as improved academic performance in schools and the transformation of schools into community hubs where families can access their resources. This data will help the city and its partners ensure they are on track to reach their goals and course correct when necessary.

4. Data-driven results

In their proposals, Promise Zones applicants are required to describe the evidence that supports the work they plan to continue or undertake. In addition, communities must manage, share, and use data for evaluation and continuous improvement; this is critical for strategies with less supporting evidence than others. This is particularly helpful to ensure that stakeholders are focused on their shared goals. Furthermore, these data will help the federal government assess the effectiveness of local efforts and direct future funding toward the strategies that have been proven to work.

While many high-poverty communities could benefit from the Promise Zones designation, the process of bringing together the strengths and resources of a community to set clear and shared goals is critical, regardless of whether a site is ultimately selected for the initiative. As the next round of applications gets underway, communities have an opportunity to coalesce around their most intractable problems and to redefine their relationship with the federal government.

 

 

 

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The Poverty of Relentless Disappointment: Rich Hill and a Vanishing American Dream https://talkpoverty.org/2014/08/22/poverty-relentless-disappointment-rich-hill-vanishing-american-dream/ Fri, 22 Aug 2014 12:00:20 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=3536 Continued]]> Rich Hill, Missouri, is about an hour and twenty minutes from Kansas City by car. According to the Census Bureau, its 2012 population was 1,341. Median household income was about $29,800, and its poverty rate was just over 27 percent — nearly double the level for Missouri and the country, but about the same as the U.S. rate for African Americans and Hispanics; the difference is that 98 percent of this poor town is white.

That’s the setting for Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos’s 2014 documentary, Rich Hill.

First we meet Andrew. “We’re not trash. We’re good people,” says the teenager. He recounts his family’s many recent moves (they’ll be uprooted three more times before the film is over), and introduces us to his sister, whom he dotes on, and his parents. His mom is possibly developmentally disabled and is missing most of her teeth. When he can, Andrew works with his father, who does “oddball jobs and stuff.” His dad is pretty good natured about it all, or at least inured to it: “You learn to survive,” he says.

When Andrew’s dad dreams, he usually dreams small, imagining a summer with enough work that he can “take the kids down to Wal-Mart, or the dollar store, and let ‘em buy whatever they want. . . . in a reasonable amount. . . .about $400 apiece worth of stuff.” He laughs at the implausibility of it.

Appachey is a bit younger; we meet him as he comes home to a dirty, crowded house, and lights a cigarette from the coils of a beat-up toaster. He tells us that his father disappeared one night when he was six and never returned. Appachey has been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder, and may have Asperger’s, says his mom, who, lying in bed with a cigarette, appears initially to be cold and hard. But as we hear more from her, it seems she’s just worn, disappointed by her life.  She says she never had a chance, going straight from her mother’s house to marriage at 17 and caring for a growing number of children. Appachey is angry, cruel to his siblings, and looking for trouble. He’s soon enough in juvenile court and sentenced to a detention facility by the film’s end.

Harley, the third teen featured, tells us that he’s on medication to control his temper while we watch him shop for a hunting knife. His mom is in prison, and she too has just had the last of her teeth pulled. He lives with his grandmother, who is supporting them with the help of a small food stamp allowance. Harley tells us that he was raped by his stepfather, who, we’ll learn, his mother then tried to kill — it’s why she’s in prison. Harley’s always on the verge of erupting in frustration and rage.

Everyone here seems exhausted and resigned to their fate. That’s not irrational, given that even those who seem to have some hope, like Andrew, barely have a chance, so deep and broad are the forces arrayed against them: A child born poor in the U.S. is likely to remain poor; and depending upon where you live, the odds of escaping such circumstances are incredibly low. People try as best they can, but trying doesn’t correlate with success. And that’s the crucial lesson.

People try as best they can, but trying doesn’t correlate with success.

Imagine you are Harley: How will you escape your status? Will you get therapy? A more effective drug regime? Tutoring to get through school? Start saving for college? Who will pay for these things? Will you get your mom out of prison? Improve your grandmother’s earning’s power? What would you do to move into the middle class if you were this particular boy?

Many viewers and critics will see much of what is portrayed in the film as “culture,” but it’s actually structure: the product of decades of disinvestment from communities like this one, which leaves behind depressed, isolated, local economies with no jobs, a dwindling tax base, and nothing to attract business or new residents; aging, dilapidated housing stock; underfunded, inferior schools; little or no access to health care and other social services; and few people around who aren’t as poor as you are. This segregation of poor people matters, producing what social scientists call “concentration effects.” Thus, disability, physical illness, and mental illness are more common in poor families and in poor places.  The fact that there are lots of people medicated in Rich Hill — Andrew’s mom, Appachey, and Harley, at least — shouldn’t surprise us.

Nor should it surprise us that so many in Rich Hill have bad teeth or no teeth at all — it’s a clear physical marker of poverty in the U.S., and another way in which disadvantages accumulate: if you’re too poor for dental care and it shows, you’ll have a much harder time finding work, which makes you less likely to secure the income or insurance that might prevent you from losing more teeth and your children from losing theirs.

There are other ways in which Rich Hill offers useful insight. Like the struggling families depicted here, most poor people in the U.S. are or have been married — contrary to the simplistic rhetoric of many, marriage is not a magical ceremony with anti-poverty powers. There are also higher rates of unintended pregnancies among poor women.  But that’s not because they’re irresponsible, but because they are poor — contraception is expensive and may require a doctor’s supervision, two large obstacles.

Most of the adults in the film work, and those who don’t are typically looking for work, disabled, or caring for children or grandchildren (who may themselves be sick or disabled). But even working and working hard won’t get you out of poverty if your wages are low — and in 2011, one-quarter of all male workers and one-third of all female workers were employed in poverty-wage jobs.

Finally, U.S. prisons are filled with poor people, just as they are in the film, and women are the fastest growing segment (although at twice the rate for black women as for whites). Mass incarceration is a consequence of poverty and also a cause of it: Having an incarcerated parent makes children poorer, and increases the likelihood that they will have their own early encounters with the criminal justice system; that reduces their chance of completing high school, which increases the likelihood that they will be poor and incarcerated as an adult, which makes them more likely to remain poor, given the difficulty ex-offenders have getting hired. Our criminal justice system is a massive engine for making people poor, sick, and angry, and if there is any such thing as a “cycle of poverty,” it’s built and maintained by public policy.

Those who appear to have abandoned hope — and that’s many of those in Rich Hill — will be blamed for their poverty by many viewers. But as insecurity rises and mobility continues to decline, more and more families might find something here to relate to.

 

 

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Amazon Army, Southeast Kansas https://talkpoverty.org/2014/05/29/gray/ Thu, 29 May 2014 10:27:51 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=2328 Continued]]> Southeast Kansas is a proud place—a place of earth and agriculture, steeped in coal and hard work—the region covers nearly 7,500 square miles and is home to over 190,000 people. The land is punctuated with wooded hills surrounding deep waterways, scars left from strip mining coal with large steam shovels. One shovel, the second largest of its kind at the time it was in operation, still stands where it was last used, a silent sentinel on the prairie, reminding us of the sacrifice and toil of generations gone by.

We’ve done it before—the people of Southeast Kansas have stood up to their oppressors and caused change.

Around the turn of the century, fathers, brothers, uncles, and sons spent their waking hours in the dark of the coal mines, sacrificing their health, and sometimes their lives, so the rest of America could have coal. They were subjected to suppression and labor exploitation, and families were being destroyed. Finally, the mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters, of the miners unified, and in 1921, came to be known as the Amazon Army. Holding American flags high, two to six thousand women marched through the coalfields in protest of the unfair and unjust working conditions and labor laws that oppressed the people of the region.  Armed only with red pepper, these women stood toe-to-toe with rifle and shotgun-bearing militia, catapulting the plight of Southeast Kansas coal miners into national newspapers, and forever changing the history of the region. But when the coal ran dry, this place was forgotten. Abandoned by the national eye, it became just another corner of a “flyover state.”

However, people are still here, and we are not flyover people. Southeast Kansans toil in manufacturing, farming, service industries, and education. We have successful business entrepreneurs, quality community colleges, and a Regents University.  However, there is an economic divide that continues to grow. The overall poverty rate reaches up to 23% in one county; the child poverty rate is nearly 29%–as high as 38.8% in one county.  In most school systems, 50 to 75% of the students receive free or reduced-price lunches. Low wages in the region make it difficult to find safe and affordable housing, and 55% of the housing stock is over 54 years old. Our elders are slipping into poverty after retirement, with nearly 10% currently living below the federal poverty line. And our average annual income from wages continues a ten-year declining trend. We are working so hard to make ends meet, that we have had little energy left to question why our economy isn’t growing, why our wages aren’t increasing, and why our civic voice isn’t being heard.

Without the leveraging power of coal, Southeast Kansans have found it difficult to stand up to the continuous attack on our future. The attack comes by way of monetary manipulation within our state legislature, which has passed one of largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever enacted by any state while leaving our schools underfunded, and our most vulnerable without medical access.  They claimed these cuts would boost our economy, but according to the Kansas Department of Revenue, tax revenue in April dropped 45 percent from the prior year—$92 million short of forecasts.

We have also faced the single largest cut to Kansas public education in state history, with more than $104 million sliced from Kansas classrooms; these cuts left school funding levels so low that the Kansas Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional.  Another highly controversial school funding bill literally passed in the middle of the night, stripping teachers of due process rights and handing out corporate tax breaks by cutting funding for at-risk kids.  And most recently, legislators passed a last-minute budget deal to transfer $5 million from early childhood program funds to an agency that invests in bioscience companies.

At the same time that tax cuts for the wealthy are shrinking needed revenues, Kansas has also rejected federal Medicaid expansion, leaving one in six Kansas adults under 65 without health insurance; nearly 100,000 Kansans in more than 150 industries without access to affordable healthcare.

We’ve done it before—the people of Southeast Kansas have stood up to their oppressors and caused change. Today, we hear gunshots ring out as we harvest deer for the year’s meat.  We hear water lapping at the banks of the pits and rivers, as we search for fish to fill our freezers. And people are starting to organize. We are forming organizations and coalitions to take control of our future, grow our own businesses, promote equitable economic development, and solutions to poor health outcomes. Economic development initiatives like Project 17, spanning 17 counties—and the Joplin Regional Prosperity Initiative, spanning 7 counties—are focused on workforce development and living wage job creation. Pittsburg’s Downtown Group and Get Independence are determined to revitalize the central business districts, promoting music, art, and culture. Local farmers and ranchers are being supported through groups like Eat Well Crawford County and the Food Policy Council forming in Iola. And county health rankings are improving, along with our overall quality of life, thanks to groups like Thrive Allen County and Live Well Crawford County.

A movement is beginning to swell—a movement that will create our own version of the Amazon Army and stand toe-to-toe with the income inequality and injustice that is ruining our region, our state, and our country.

 

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Concentrated Poverty and The Case for Promise Zones https://talkpoverty.org/2014/05/22/ross/ Thu, 22 May 2014 11:36:15 +0000 http://talkpoverty.abenson.devprogress.org/?p=2220 Continued]]> In his post, “The Ghetto Is Public Policy,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, national correspondent at The Atlantic states, “The wealth gap is not a mistake. It is the logical outcome of policy and democratic will.” For decades, federal leaders invested in the stability of affluent, predominantly white communities, while giving localities the autonomy to neglect and exclude low-income communities and communities of color. Such practices included redlining, beginning in the 1930s, where banks were allowed to exclude African American communities from receiving home loans. Or following World War II, when many metropolitan regions saw highways rammed through many low-income, mostly African American communities, displacing thousands of residents and small businesses and ripping apart the fabric of long established neighborhoods. And then there was the federal government’s “Urban Renewal” effort of the 1950s and 1960s, which gave local governments and private developers free rein to develop downtowns and displace residents with no clear policy for relocation.  At best, residents were moved to public housing located in already segregated, poor neighborhoods with few resources.

Today, concentrated poverty persists, with many communities facing inferior housing, poor health outcomes, failing schools, inadequate public infrastructure, and few employment opportunities. A growing body of research shows that being raised in such high-poverty communities undermines the long-term life chances of children. For example, poverty has been shown to genetically age children, and living in communities exposed to violence impairs cognitive ability. Even when income is held constant, families living in areas of concentrated poverty are more likely to struggle to meet basic needs than their counterparts living in more affluent areas.

However, it is important to note that low-income people are not the only residents of high-poverty neighborhoods. According to research by Professor Patrick Sharkey of New York University, the average African American family making $100,000 a year lives in a more disadvantaged neighborhood than the average white family making $30,000 a year, revealing how past social policies continue to affect neighborhood choice. Sharkey explains that the same, mostly African American families have lived in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods over long periods of time and over multiple generations, limiting access to better opportunities. “Neighborhood poverty experienced a generation ago doesn’t disappear. It doesn’t become inconsequential. It lingers on to affect the next generation,” he explained.

The enduring effects of concentrated poverty require long-term, comprehensive strategies that will be experienced across generations.

It is clear that the federal government has a role to play in undoing the effects of past policies that contributed to these outcomes. Further, as research shows that income inequality and social mobility place a downward drag on national prosperity, the federal government has a vested interest in ensuring that all communities connect people with the opportunities critical to helping them succeed.

Federal and local efforts must move away from short-term investments, such as relocating a fraction of families to more prosperous communities, towards transforming communities in order to alter their trajectories. “When I’m asking for durable urban policy, I’m not asking for a unique commitment to low-income, nonwhite communities. I’m proposing that we extend the commitment and the massive investments that have been made in affluent, predominantly white communities and extend them to…communities across the country,” Sharkey explained.

This is why place-based strategies, such as the Promise Zones initiative, are so important. Such strategies involve policies and practices that take into account how a community—both the built environment and the social and economic opportunities available—impacts its residents. The intersection of place with poverty comes with unique challenges that require place-based strategies to complement our national investments to cut poverty and create greater economic opportunity.

The Promise Zones initiative is designed to revitalize high-poverty communities through comprehensive, evidence-based strategies and help local leaders navigate federal funding. Promise Zones designees receive priority access to federal resources to support job creation, increase economic security, expand educational opportunities, increase access to quality, affordable housing, and improve public safety. Equally important, the initiative pulls together lessons from the administration’s previous efforts to improve struggling communities and is serving as an opportunity to rethink how the federal government can be a more effective partner to communities facing barriers to upward mobility.

The enduring effects of concentrated poverty require long-term, comprehensive strategies that will be experienced across generations. The Promise Zones initiative has the potential to serve this role and finally extend the benefits of stable communities to all people.

 

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