Development
Community revitalization must start with persisently poor neighborhoods
The economic and social deterioration of urban neighborhoods over the last several decades has been of particular interest to researchers, politicians, and community activists because of the positive and negative effects of neighborhood conditions on individual outcomes. According to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the level of poverty in a neighborhood is the strongest determinant of a child's future economic stability. The study found that half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today's dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods. By contrast, only 1% of white middle-class children grew up in high-poverty communities.
Renovation in Trinidad. Photo by Moravsky Vrabec.
In the United States, neighborhood poverty rates have fluctuated over time in response to population growth, spatial distribution of the poor, and changing economic conditions. Although neighborhoods exist at many different levels, such as in suburban or rural areas, historically American cities and their corresponding neighborhoods have been characterized as highly segregated along racial and class lines that disadvantage women and poor and minority families by limiting their social and economic opportunities. Urban areas have seen dramatic shifts in neighborhood poverty. The flight of white (and middle class blacks) to suburban areas left the poor behind. Where as the social and economic forces behind gentrification has reversed inner-city decline. However, a subset of neighborhoods across urban areas are persistently poor and have endured unfavorable economic and social conditions for decades, often affecting generations of families.
Persistent neighborhood poverty endangers the well-being children, youth, and families. Families and children who live in highly disadvantaged neighborhoods must contend with high levels of crime, violence, and a deteriorating physical and economic infrastructure.
To illustrate persistent neighborhood poverty in the District, I classified neighborhood as persistently poor if their corresponding census tract had a household poverty rate of at least 20 percent or more in 1990 and 2000. Of all the geographic measures available from the U.S. Census, census tracts are considered a decent representation of a neighborhood.
In 2000, there were 59 census tracts that were identified as poor in 1990 and 2000. Persistently poor neighborhoods are not equally distributed across the District; instead, they are clustered in a select number of areas, such as Columbia Heights, Shaw, Trinidad, Deanwood, Barry Farm and Congress Heights (see map). The area around GWU primarily represents students with limited incomes and is not reflective of the typical poor neighborhood.
Children are more likely than adults to live in poor neighborhoods. In 2000, close to 40,000 District children lived in persistently neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 20 percent or more. Persistently poor neighborhoods in DC are also more likely to be majority Black. Thus, Blacks are both economically and racially segregated.
The District went through a tremendous amount of growth over the last decade and it will be interesting to see if the number and location of persistently poor neighborhoods has changed. New income and poverty data will be available from the American Community Survey in early September, but data at the neighborhood level will not be available until 2010.
Tackling problems associated with persistently poor neighborhoods will require both short term and long term solutions. Children and families living in poor communities need access to high quality and better-coordinated social services to meet immediate needs. Policies to improve the long-term health of persistently poor neighborhoods will require a combination of economic, housing, and social solutions.
A number of steps have been taken on the housing front to improve neighborhood conditions. Geographically fixed public housing tends to segregate the poor. Two main approaches have been taken to de-segregate poor neighborhoods. First, Section 8 provides low-income families with a "voucher" to find rental housing in the private housing market. However, research indicates that voucher users often struggle to found housing in the private market and report problems paying rent and utilities. In a tight rental market like DC's, families using a voucher usually end up in other distressed communities, defeating the purpose of the program. Second, HOPE IV HOPE VI is a program implemented by HUD to replace high-rise public housing buildings with mix-income housing. HOPE IV VI has been criticized for reducing the number of low-income housing units and there is no conclusive evidence that the program has led to measurable neighborhood redevelopment.
Improving neighborhood conditions is vital and can yield positive outcomes for families and children. However, neighborhood conditions will not improve strictly through the use of housing vouchers or mix-income housing, especially in areas with tight housing markets. Schools will have to be improved and viable economic opportunities will need to be created. These are just some of the challenges facing persistently poor neighborhoods.
Lynda Laughlin is a family demographer at the U.S. Census Bureau. She holds a PhD in sociology and enjoys reading, writing, and researching issues related to families and communities, urban economics, and urban development. Lynda lives in Mt. Pleasant. Views expressed here are strictly her own.   |
Comments
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by Joey on Aug 10, 2009 11:58 am • link • report
by цarьchitect on Aug 10, 2009 12:15 pm • link • report
by SG on Aug 10, 2009 12:41 pm • link • report
Kentucky Courts was a horror show back in the 90's , and Capper & Potomac Gardens, plus Taylor, were all decrepit and hotbeds of crime and disorder. It is high time that Potomac "Gardens" and Taylor "Gardens" be demolished and their dysfunctional inhabitants relocated out to White Flint or to Vienna instead of dumping all of the region's ills on the un-represented city.
These suburbanite do-gooders love to come into DC to help out in commmunity kitchens and homeless shelters.
if they all love these things so much, then they should be removed to where these affluent people live.
let them deal with all of the consequences , for a change.
by w on Aug 10, 2009 1:30 pm • link • report
by MPC on Aug 10, 2009 1:48 pm • link • report
You people have had it way too easy over the years.
Maybe it is time for you all in the suburbs to learn how to run when gangs of "youth" come running after you- or maybe you could feel better if these people you all feel so sorry for lived next door and made it a real security threat for you and your families every time you left the door of your house.
We have put up with this kind of crap for far too long in DC- and have had every pressure group from the left and the right experimenting on our good city.
It is high time they started doing this out in the sanctity of the suburbs.
The place of the city must be returned to it's rightful position in the heirarchy of Civilization.
by w on Aug 10, 2009 1:59 pm • link • report
by Fritz on Aug 10, 2009 2:51 pm • link • report
Additionally, From Despair to Hope: HOPE VI and the New Promise of Public Housing in AmericaÂ’s Cities chronicles HOPE VI and addresses the challenges and pitfalls the program has faced [full disclosure: I was the publicist for this book]. I am cautiously optimistic that we are getting to a place where we are able to create housing policy based in part on lessons learned rather than continuing to make the same mistakes - at the detriment of many - over and over again.
by jaime on Aug 10, 2009 3:03 pm • link • report
Between 1990-2000, did poverty in DC become more concentrated or more dispersed? Were there poor neighborhoods in 1990 which weren't in 2000? Vice versa?
If there's been a change, can we identify any causes?
by Gavin Baker on Aug 10, 2009 3:13 pm • link • report
What improvements in terms of transportation, land use, environmental conditions, etc. could ameliorate conditions in poor neighborhoods?
How does inclusionary zoning come into this?
by Gavin Baker on Aug 10, 2009 3:15 pm • link • report
sorry to say
you are dead WRONG
Demolition of the awful housing projects south of the Sw/SE freeway has resulted in a MAJOR drop in crime in the areas around the Navy Yard and Capitol Hill.
Having all of these dysfunctional people in one place, w/o access to jobs or any kind of positive examples for the young people to grow up seeing is a disaster.
Many have been given portability with the section #8 vouchers and those who have been enterprising have left already for greener horizons. This is not about eliminating poor or disadvantaged people- it is about getting criminals to leave who prey on the very people who pay the exorbitant taxes that enable these very "housing projects" to exist.
Oftentimes criminals or deviants congregate and prey on the very people trying to better themselves- and bring down everyone while they are at it.
Public housing is a failed experiment. Hopefully people have learned from it. Moving folks out to where the jobs are is a great idea.
by w on Aug 10, 2009 3:19 pm • link • report
The place of the city must be returned to it's rightful position in the heirarchy of Civilization.
O rly?
Great job treating the poor like commodities, as if they're just to be shuffled around like cattle.
W, you're nothing more than a NIMBY. You don't want to help the poor, you just want them somewhere else. As Alpert is fond of saying, you're an "Anti neighbor"
by MPC on Aug 10, 2009 3:30 pm • link • report
We can agree that concentrated public housing is a failed experiment. HOPE VI attempted to right those wrongs.
Finally, you are still - no matter what type of bow you wrap it up with - saying that you'd like to shuffle the poor out of the city, "to where the jobs are" (there are jobs here). At least, in this iteration, you allow that not everyone in public housing is a criminal.
by jaime on Aug 10, 2009 3:47 pm • link • report
I'm not also really sure what Lynda is driving at. Pointing out that poor areas areas are mostly concentrated in the eastern half of the city is not exactly breaking news.
by Daniel on Aug 10, 2009 4:11 pm • link • report
if you actually grew up here in the 70's and had to deal with the horrible crime problems we had here you would not be saying this.
Actually I agree with Jamie on Hope 6- which is very enlightened. Im saying that these people need to be dispersed so that they can have better access to opportunities, education, jobs.
Having grown up around this crap, I can attest to the FACT that when you concentrate poor or dysfunctional people in one place they have a way of holding one another down. It is the ghetto equivalent to the suburban Smiths and Jones concept.They also fall into a pattern of crime ,violence, drugs, etc..and victimize everyone around them.An endless cycle of destruction ensues.Cities across the USA have had to deal with this.
Why should the poor people automatically be destined to live in the city? Actually a real part of the problem was that many of these poor folks- Blacks who were the bottom on the rung or in agricultural dead end jobs in the deep south who made their way north in the 50's and early 60's, are not culturally city people and are not acclimatized to city life. The same was true of Irish peasants in the 1840's, who horriffied cities up & down the eastern seaboard.
These unpleasant topics need to be aired. Acting in a politically correct fashion as though they do not matter only harms or gets in the way of solutions that are fair.these folks deserve a chance. I agree- Hope 6 was and still is the best thing going for the people & neighborhoods scarred by this blight and neglect.
by w on Aug 10, 2009 4:48 pm • link • report
Daniel - the point is that the areas that I highlighted have been persistently poor for the last 20 years whereas other parts of the DC have seem more change overtime. We need a better understanding of why certain parts of DC never seem to revitalize while others do and what social and economic policies can promote positive change.
by Lynda on Aug 10, 2009 5:01 pm • link • report
http://dcmud.blogspot.com/2009/01/miraculous-move-for-affordable-housing.html
by dcguy on Aug 10, 2009 5:09 pm • link • report
Wow, that is a bad project. "New Sursum Corda" isn't too far off..down to the "internal landscaped courtyards" that become open-air drug markets in the original (along with almost every other project of its type.)
by Phil on Aug 10, 2009 5:23 pm • link • report
Policies to improve the long-term health of persistently poor neighborhoods will require a combination of economic, housing, and social solutions.
Okay - so what? That's just sounds like political pie-in-the-sky talk with little substance. Then the author continues by berating the government programs designed to tackle all of those issues. If projects like HOPE VI fail (which, from my knowledge and experience, is not exactly true), then what do you suggest needs to change?
I think we can all agree that poor neighborhoods feed back into themselves - perpetuating a cycle of poverty. Mixed-income areas are critical to stemming the cycle - if the working poor are shown the promise of upward mobility in their own backyards, it provides motivation for betterment of themselves and their community.
Frankly, based on the title of the essay, I get the impression that what the author mostly wants is for capital improvement projects for public housing. While that may be necessary for certain delipidated facilities, a simple facelift will not solve the problem and it certainly doesn't correct the isolation of poor communities. Dispersing public housing across the area is a big part of the solution that would prevent the larger poor communities from festering and cut down on associated crime from these horrible "complexes".
My two cents.
by umm... on Aug 10, 2009 5:35 pm • link • report
Some of those depictions on the map are wrong some of them include areas where no one resides such as the plant on Benning Road, McMillian Resorvior, Ft. Chaplin Park, Anacostia Park, The area to the northeast of the former Greater SouthEast Community Hospital, New York Ave between North Capitol ST NE and Maryland none of these areas have any residents and many are not apart of any neighborhoods.
This makes the areas seem larger than they truly are.
And if GWU is added because of students why arent American & Georgtown also added ?
by kk on Aug 10, 2009 5:51 pm • link • report
by MPC on Aug 10, 2009 5:57 pm • link • report
The price of the school isn't a factor if GWU is 50K vs American or Georgetown at say 30k it depends on how much money the student has for all you or I know they could be on scholarship in that case we have no info on there or there family's wealth, paying out of pocket, loans if there using a loan we know that they can not afford the school and the case may still be the same with either Georgetown or AMU we don't know there economic situation
by kk on Aug 10, 2009 6:46 pm • link • report
Dealing with issues of persistent poverty and the households in persistent poverty is a different question from "urban revitalization."
Urban revitalization is a place based strategy.
By definition "revitalization" of people/households in persistent poverty is a person-based problem/issue and requires a particular set of responses.
The failure of the "community development" movement (i.e., see ) is due to the fact that building better housing for poor people wasn't a strategy that ended up being focused on center city economic improvement.
See this piece by Nicholas Lemann in the NYT Magazine in 1994: http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/magazine/the-myth-of-community-development.html
A good book, place-based, but focused on improvement of the situation of the persistently poor, is _Community Economic Development Handbook_ by Temali.
by Richard Layman on Aug 10, 2009 7:05 pm • link • report
1. Abolish tenure. Who in private industry has tenure? It make no sense at all; it benefits teachers, not students.
2. Require strict licensing requirements for teaching to ensure that teachers are qualified in their subject area and in methods of teaching and discipline.
3. Enforce conduct rules at schools to ensure that disruptive students cannot continue to disrupt classes with impunity.
4. Establish and impart high expectations on all students.
5. Hold the political leadership accountable if schools do not show improvement. Can you imagine the uproar if our water system were run as poorly as the school system? Sadly, since only the poor are stuck in DCPS, there's little political pressure in this one-party town to hold anyone accountable.
by Monumentality on Aug 10, 2009 10:57 pm • link • report
by Richard Layman on Aug 11, 2009 8:34 am • link • report
http://dcmud.blogspot.com/2009/01/miraculous-move-for-affordable-housing.html"
St. Martin's apartments is 178 units, most of which will be affordable at 60% Area Median Income - for a household of 2, that's about $53,000/yr income. This is on par with incomes in the neighborhood. About 1/3 will be small apartments for very low income people who are graduates of the Catholic Communities Services transition from homelessness program. A number of these graduates were residents at the existing convent on this site - and by all accounts were good neighbors.
Well managed affordable apartment buildings, Inclusionary Zoning (which requires new housing developments to provide 8-10% of the units affordable at 50-80% AMI), rent supplements to households, additional funding for the Housing Trust Fund - these are all part of the solution to helping DC families have stable, decent, affordable homes. Our city is still a starkly divided one, as this post explains. We need to do more.
by ccort on Aug 11, 2009 11:12 am • link • report
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