Detroit Free Press, February 17, 2008: Fight Must Start in Cities
Drive through Detroit’s east side, the north side of Philadelphia, the south side of Chicago or Milwaukee’s near north side. Parts of urban America look like battle zones — burned-out buildings, decaying streets, vacant lots strewn with trash, empty factories and abandoned homes. There are blocks where it’s much easier to buy alcohol than apples, where life expectancy is similar to that in a Third World nation’s, where far more young men go to prison than to college.
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In the last 15 years, massive public and private investments have resurrected dying downtowns, including Detroit’s, into vital entertainment, retail and housing centers. But such redevelopments have so far changed little in the low-income neighborhoods of U.S. cities.
Nearly 40 million Americans are officially poor — meaning an annual income of less than $16,000 for a family of three. Eight in 10 of them live in urban areas.
Cities are the best place for the next president to start seriously attacking poverty in America. While it’s true that their conditions create many barriers to moving people out of poverty, central cities can also serve as focal points for public and private efforts — supported by their surrounding regions — to get large numbers of people gainfully employed.
Every American has a stake in this problem.
In a rich nation, moral arguments can be made for improving the lives of millions who cannot afford a decent place to live, adequate health care or reliable transportation. But reducing poverty is also in the national self-interest. Poverty, especially concentrated urban poverty, has created chronic unemployment afflicting generations and, with it, a culture of hopelessness, anger and despair. It hinders economic development and exacts enormous costs in crime, health care, incarceration and public assistance.
Large cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia and Milwaukee report poverty rates of more than 20% — in most cases more than double the rate for their states. Inside those cities are census tracts, in mostly minority neighborhoods, with poverty rates of more than 40%. Over the last 35 years, manufacturing jobs and much of the middle class have fled to the suburbs. The urban poor remaining in the central cities lack the skills for jobs in the new economy, and the transportation to get to them.
Unemployment numbers for poor urban minorities greatly understate the problem, because they exclude the long-term unemployed. Studies of working age African-American men in Milwaukee and New York City, for example, show 40% or more without jobs.
Act before disaster strikes
Unfortunately, the nation’s leaders over the last 40 years have practically ignored urban poverty except, briefly, after cities such as Los Angeles or Benton Harbor, Mich., explode into riots. The next president must act before disaster strikes.
Without question, some government anti-poverty programs have been wasteful and ineffective, serving mainly the middle-class bureaucrats who run them. Despite billions of dollars spent to reduce poverty since 1970, poverty rates — now at 13% of the U.S. population — have remained stubbornly stable.
Even so, intelligent and accountable government action can work. Direct urban aid programs such as Head Start, for example, helped cut U.S. poverty rates nearly in half during the 1960s, from 22% of the population to 12%. The point too often missed is that President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s, in many ways, worked.
Even with a new emphasis on local public-private partnerships, ending poverty in America will take certain large-scale efforts by the federal government. The president and Congress must agree on a plan to cover the 47 million Americans without health insurance, most of them working poor people. Raising the federal minimum wage, which continually trails inflation, would enable even low-skilled workers to live decently and better themselves.
Helping people get private sector jobs is the best answer. Still, as a last resort, the federal government ought to create or fund public works programs that would put people to work cleaning parks, fixing aging sewer systems, or doing other public works jobs. Requiring able-bodied people to work is a sound principle, but only if jobs are available.
The federal government should allow the working poor to keep more of their money, too, by expanding the earned income tax credit. Income assistance such as food stamps should generally require capable adults to do something that better equips them for the job market, such as earning a GED or taking a community college class.
Local strategies that work
Ultimately, however, poverty must be attacked at the local level. It is a multidimensional problem, involving, among other things, transportation, education, health care, job training, affordable housing and financial literacy.
The federal government can’t deliver those services, but it can, with economic incentives, encourage cities to coordinate local resources to get poor people training, transportation and jobs. Requiring cities to have a collaborative plan to get new federal anti-poverty grants would push local public and private agencies to cooperate instead of working in virtual silos.
Ideally, federal anti-poverty grants would go to cities with a community-wide action plan, instead of funneling separate grants, with different guidelines and reporting requirements, to competing agencies. The federal government should determine the amount of such grants by population and poverty rates, and it should demand measurable results.
Without waiting for the federal government, Savannah, Ga., population 131,000, is showing how such a plan, with strong civic leadership, can work. A four-year-old initiative called Step Up Savannah has more than 80 public and private agencies cooperating to reduce poverty, especially in five city neighborhoods where poverty rates are 40% or more.
Step Up’s annual budget of only $200,000 comes partly from the city and county and includes donated office space from the Savannah Chamber. Having an office in the Chamber’s downtown building has sent a powerful message to the region that reducing poverty helps economic development.
Savannah’s 22% poverty rate has remained the same for nearly 30 years, and 60% of poor families work. Mayor Otis Johnson aims to cut the city’s poverty rate by at least 5% by 2010, a modest but realistic goal. Poverty is no longer a partisan political issue in Savannah — nor should it be anywhere.
“It’s not altruism for the business community — it’s the bottom line,” Johnson said. “Prospective businesses have questions about the crime rate, workforce skills and schools. We want to be able to say that Savannah is a good place to do business. And when people move out of poverty, they become bigger consumers.”
To reduce blight in high poverty neighborhoods, the city is strictly enforcing codes, seizing abandoned buildings through eminent domain, tearing them down and selling the properties to nonprofits to build affordable housing. It has also provided incentives for home ownership by underwriting mortgages.
Step Up Savannah has put on poverty simulation exercises for government and business leaders to give them, through role playing, a taste of what it’s like to be poor. So far, 2,500 leaders have taken part, said Project Director Daniel Dodd. In another innovative program, the collaborative mentored and provided services to 25 poor families for a year, taking a firsthand look at the problems they faced.
“For the first time, the powers-that-be are letting us drive the machine,” said Pamela Oglesby, 54, a west Savannah community activist who is on Step Up’s leadership board.
Step Up Savannah is guided by so-called action teams on affordable housing, health care, workforce training, transportation, education, child and dependent care and financial literacy — otherwise called asset building. Each team has up to 20 members, representing public and private agencies and low-income residents, who identify problems and get to work on solutions.
In the last year, 60 people have finished a construction apprenticeship program, and 55 of those were placed in jobs through the Homebuilders Association of Greater Savannah.
At a cost to the county of only $3,000 per student, the program also provides lessons in so-called soft skills, including punctuality, how to dress, following instructions, cooperating with other employees and resolving conflicts.
That’s a small price to pay to give skills and hope to young men like Lawrence Hayes, 23, and Ronnie Bradley, 29.
Neither finished high school, and both had worked sporadically at low-paying general labor jobs. Hayes was expelled under a zero-tolerance policy after school officials, during a routine drug sweep, found a box cutter from work that Hayes had accidentally left in his pocket.
Bradley left high school in the 10th grade after he was sent to a youth detention center for selling crack cocaine to an undercover officer.
Now both have a skill and a future. After graduating, they’ll start earning $15 to $20 an hour. Bradley wants to eventually own his own business.
“It’s taught me I don’t have to hustle to be successful,” he said.
Make people self-sufficient
Presidents define what’s important for the nation. A president who would visit a poor central-city neighborhood, or talk about the problems of the people who live there, would end a 40-year silence and, once again, focus the nation’s attention and political will on ending poverty. With private sector support, a fraction of the $10 billion a month the United States spends in Iraq would go a long way toward reducing poverty at home.
Urban ghettos, segregated by class and race, have helped create a so-called underclass that undercuts the nation’s economic progress and tears its social fabric. Bringing disenfranchised people into the economic mainstream is the right, and smart, thing to do. Cities offer the best opportunity to do that.