You Can't Afford to Overlook Community Poverty Any More

Community poverty contributes to overall inability to form an attractive neighborhood and community. It seems to be out of fashion to talk about poverty or poor neighborhoods overtly, but it's a conversation we desperately need to have. We need to stop pretending it's not the single determining factor in some neighborhoods from the most rural to the most urban.

After a career of working with poverty issues in one way or another, I can tell you that having a concentration of poverty doesn't improve human life. It's what holds back our world (see the important books of Jeffrey Sachs and Thomas Friedman in this regard). And the lack of community economic development is such an impediment to forgotten neighborhoods.

Community poverty simply represents a center of lost productivity. If you run a firm with 10 employees, and one doesn't contribute, you get rid of the non-contributing member. Or if you're in a situation where you can't fire them, because of legal difficulties or your own timidity, you try your best to make them a productive member of the team. I know; I've been there. You maneuver them into this nook and cranny of the business, and then that, until you find some way that they are pulling their weight.

And why would we think that the non-producing part of our community would be any different?

You may think your community poverty is well hidden, but the bad news is that rail, planes, transit, and highways all display your community poverty quite well. You local television news or Internet maps will blow your cover. So it's no good hoping it will go away. A concentrated area of poverty is the least likely of urban or community problems to heal itself.

Individual families and individuals do lift themselves out of poverty, through hard work, a little luck, and education. But a concentrated community poverty area does not improve spontaneously.

A few areas might make it over the crest of the hill through dedicated and skilled professionals effectively targeting Community Development Block Grant and many other federal, state, and local programs into a particular area. And occasionally a single new employer will lift the tide. But mostly it takes hard block by block community development and intense effort with individuals to overcome poverty, and not merely relocate it to next area of concentrated poverty.

The Role of Racial and Ethnic Segregation in Poverty

Good scholarship now shows that the income disparities and wealth disparities between majority and minority households continues to hold true as a generalization. Discrimination still certainly exists, but even more importantly, racial segregation in residential areas and in the social arena separates African-American and Hispanic households from the best schools, the social networks by which we hear about employment, and the variety of job opportunities that are necessary to begin on a low rung of the ladder and have a better opportunity waiting for you in a couple of years.

Inclusive communities help people of all races to lose their stereotypes and to be more willing to interact with other racial and ethnic groups in the workplace. They also help children, young adults, and adults learn how to adapt to differences in the workplace and at school without necessarily having to lose important elements of ethnic identity. Inclusive zoning, in which zoning ordinances consciously aim at providing a variety of housing types and prices, can promote integration.

So civic and community leaders, continue to work to promote an inclusive multi-ethnic residential environment and inter-group understanding. In metropolitan areas with high proportions of immigrants and refugees, encourage your folks to learn something about the other cultures and to integrate the newcomers into the mainstream culture as soon as possible.

Only by inclusivity will we eliminate community poverty.

Addressing Individual Poverty

Our emphasis on community poverty doesn't mean that we think systemic racism is the main reason people are in poverty. Individual factors vary hugely, but certainly these are some explanatory elements:

• Lack of sufficient education to give versatility in the workforce

• Lack of financial management skills and understanding of traps such as payday loans or other predatory lending practices

• Bad luck with medical bills, lawsuits, unemployment, foreclosure

• Life-changing events such as imprisonment and divorce

• Having too many children too young

• Lack of a social network that understands and transmits coping skills, provides appropriate emotional support, and confronts anti-social behaviors

• Addictions and/or bad decisions made when under the influence of a mind-altering drug

• Depression, often covering most of a life in community poverty areas, and also "running in families," as if inherited, in concentrations of poverty

• Lack of understanding of find job prospects, obtain a job, and manage the "soft skills" of holding a job such as giving the job priority over other distractions, showing up on time, calling when sick or late, and so forth.

Community Support for Individual Poverty Cases

The community at large can and should provide a number of types of assistance to individuals in poverty:

• Convenient access to mental health and substance abuse providers

• A well-run public transportation system that travels all the arterial roads

• Support for social service providers, faith-based groups, and governmental agencies that help individuals combat poverty

• Inclusive zoning promoting a mix of housing types and price points

• A dynamic community mental health emphasis in areas of need

• Community-based financial institutions that will be trusted by minorities and immigrants and that can therefore drive the predatory lenders out of business

• Encouragement of Individual Development Account (IDA) programs, a type of savings program helping low-income households target specific life events, such as home ownership, for which they are saving

• Attention to environmental-justice, so that undesirable land uses such as landfills don't further depress values for poor families.

Metropolitan or Micropolitan Area Support to End Community Poverty

Since this site is most concerned with community development, let's take the community development approach to community poverty. It's incredibly important that the metropolitan area embrace housing affordability as a goal and responsibly attempt to disperse low-income households throughout the region.

How could this community poverty approach happen? A coalition should be created among the public housing authority(ies), the local government(s), the metropolitan or regional planning council if one exists, the strongest of the nonprofits, community funds and foundations, and faith-based organizations and smaller nonprofits that want to join.

Then they need to engage in a serious community poverty planning process, analogous to what happens in physical planning. Social planning has become so rare that we hardly know how to do it. Conversations among nonprofits too frequently are turf-laden maneuverings, so that's why local governments and planning councils need leadership roles in this entire effort.

Writing a serious social, physical, and economic plan of the type needed to responsibly and humanely disperse poor households across a metropolitan effort is a two or three year effort, but well worth it.

Why? Because when people are dispersed into suburbs, with each suburb only absorbing a few such households, as shown in the 1990s Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program experience in the Chicago area, outcomes were much better for the families that went to the suburbs than for those that stayed in community poverty areas of the city. The surrounding culture lifted educational achievement and aspiration, as well as income.

What's the public interest here? Is this just some do-gooder daydream? No, there's a very solid economic interest. The productivity of the metropolitan or micropolitan area will increase when households aren't living on welfare and disability, but instead are living on a paycheck. Ideally it's a paycheck that contributes to the economic base of the community.

While we will always have some individual poverty, just as we always have some individual bankruptcy, unemployment, and foreclosure, there's no need for all of the folks suffering from poverty to be huddled together in one little pocket in the metro area. Because that pocket likely will become a "sink," where all types of environmentally distasteful activities also will concentrate. Then the socially marginal activities, such as drug selling and prostitution, will know where to locate as well. Even the rats know where to go.

This condition is called concentration of poverty. To map urban concentration of poverty, see the Windows on Urban Poverty website.

The way I think of this is that there's a piece of the anti-concentrated poverty action for people who like to work with:

• People

• Ideas

• Things

That covers almost all of us. Those who like to work with people actually do the one-on-one parts of this overall mission statement. They provide the mental health and substance abuse counseling, they teach people about going to work on time and speaking respectfully to an employer of a different background, and they teach in GED and vocational and higher education. They teach social skills to people who have none.

Those who like to work with ideas engage in this two or three-year planning process, lining up the partnerships with multiple agencies and entities. They figure out how to leverage a federal program with a slight subsidy from a state program, bringing in a community foundation to fill the gaps. They think up the financing.

The Physical Side of Planning to Reduce and Eliminate Community Poverty

Now let's speak directly to those who like to work with things. Specifically with buildings. You need to go out and find the people who straddle ideas and things and visual thinking. They're called architects. Find some money to hire them, and then hold their feet to the fire until they come up with some practical and pretty ways to adapt your existing housing stock to work in some affordable housing units all over your town or city.

Remember the "big house" concept, where what appears to be a large house (typical of turn-of-the-century, 1920s, or 2000s development) actually is a three-plex or a four-plex. Perhaps and even preferably it's owner-occupied in one section, and the other two or three units are occupied by lower-income individuals trying to get on their feet.

This accomplishes two things: (a) You can preserve the architectural integrity of the community, perhaps even making it feasible to preserve some old mansions that otherwise might not be practical to heat and cool, and (b) You can expose lower-income households at close range to higher-income households.

This isn't as tricky as you think, because remember that most college students, graduate students, and senior citizens are "low-income" people too. So in a three-plex, you could have an owner-occupant using half of the space in a big old house, now rehabbed, and one apartment for a grad student and one apartment for a low-income household.

Incorporate these architectural ideas into the plan. Show where this would work, from an architectural and demographic standpoint. Don't tip an area that already has about as many disadvantaged families as it can handle over the edge. Put those poverty folks, once they are crime-free and drug-free, into neighborhoods where employment and education is sound.

Now when I'm saying you're going to work on a social plan for two or three years, I mean you're going to really hammer it out. It's not a writing exercise about some vague principles, goals, or objectives. You're going to say this specifically is who could organize and orchestrate which part of the plan, where it will be within a few blocks, how it could be paid for, and how it could be designed to overcome objections.

Because there will be plenty of objections when you start scattering poor people around. It's amazing how 10,000 thoroughly middle class and upwardly mobile households calculate that two or three poverty households added to their community will certainly spoil the stew. Instead of adding spice.

The Useful and Redundant Plan

That's why the plan must be thorough and redundant.

Let me explain plan redundancy. I don't like to give people the idea that your plan should be flexible. It should be as inflexible as a concrete block wall when it comes to the goal. But it needs to be redundant; it needs to demonstrate many possible ways to travel from Point A to Point B. But each one needs to be checked for a surface degree of feasibility in advance.

Don't let anyone write something into the plan that you know in advance won't work. Don't let perpetual cynics, skeptics, and pessimists dominate the planning process or any aspect of it. But if you know for sure that something can't be done, it isn't part of the Plan, is it?

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