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Authors: David Hilfiker,Marian Wright Edelman

Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen (17 page)

BOOK: Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen
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There are several take-home lessons for Americans here:
∘
It is possible to create a national social insurance program that does not allow anyone’s income to fall below a level considered necessary to live decently. So defined, poverty is not an inescapable fact of human nature, political science, or even a capitalist economy.
∘
Creating such a system is expensive. It requires significantly higher levels of taxation than Americans have been willing to allow.
∘
There is nothing intrinsic in this kind of social insurance that leads to lack of motivation or laziness. Given the proper support, most people will use the program appropriately. It is important to recognize, however, that the enormous physical and psychic damage already done to too many poor people in our country would demand much more intensive and expensive support for the first generation or two.
 
 
How, then, might we build such a system in the United States?
 
Six
 
ENDING POVERTY AS WE KNOW IT
 
AS LONG AS THERE ARE GHETTOS…
 
In eradicating urban poverty in the United States, by far the most important policy change would be a strong commitment to the goal of desegregation, both racial and economic. As long as there are ghettos, Jonathan Kozol has written, there will be ghetto desperation. If one puts all of the poorest people together in one area, removes the jobs, decimates social networks, and thus causes the myriad problems that result, generational despair is simply inevitable.
 
In his book
Return Flight
, Robert Lupton describes the concept of “re-neighboring” and his experience in moving his own family and other affluent people into poor urban neighborhoods. The advantages of living in a diverse, lively city neighborhood are becoming attractive to some. By bringing their skills and education to a neighborhood, moving in their own families, encouraging the development of low-income housing, helping neighbors to buy their homes or apartments so that gentrification will not drive them out, and creating new living spaces, small groups of people have revitalized neighborhoods without forcing residents out and completely gentrifying the areas. While this is, I think, unlikely to become a mass movement, Lupton’s experiment indicates that there are ways of revitalizing neighborhoods without removing the poor.
 
A more common opportunity for cities is the process of gentrification that often occurs. Neighborhoods change. For one reason or another—dissatisfaction with commuting, desire to live in a city once children are grown, the cost of owning or renting—affluent people begin moving into less affluent neighborhoods. Developers buy up old properties and build new luxury apartments. The usual story is that the poor are pushed out to other, worse neighborhoods. That doesn’t have to happen, however. City governments can steer the gentrification process onto another track that maintains the area’s affordable housing. The property tax structure can be changed so that low-income homeowners aren’t forced out by climbing tax assessments. Low-interest loans can be made available to tenants to purchase their buildings and create affordable housing. Tax incentives and permit requirements can induce developers to create a certain number of low-income units in their new buildings. Vibrant, diverse neighborhoods
can
be built.
 
On a potentially much larger scale, there have been some interesting experiments that bring indigent people into affluent neighborhoods. The specter of “the poor” moving into “our” world is threatening to most middle- and upper-class Americans. We fear that the problems of the inner city will accompany them. One fascinating study, conducted over the last twenty-five years, has been the Gautreaux Project in Chicago. Its profound implications have not, however, been generally recognized. Chicago public housing has always been highly segregated. As part of the settlement of a federal civil rights suit in the 1970s, the city of Chicago agreed to fund a study of what happened to approximately five thousand families from a public housing project that was being razed. The tenants were, for all practical purposes, randomly assigned to two groups. Both groups were offered federal housing vouchers that could be used anywhere a landlord would accept them. Families in the “inner-city group” were offered the usual social service agency help in finding housing in another inner-city area. Families in the “suburban group,” however, were given the opportunity to move into affluent, usually white, neighborhoods in the suburbs. Other than locating landlords who would accept the housing vouchers, neither group was given any special help. These two groups were then followed closely and have been statistically compared over the last twenty-five years.
 
To oversimplify, the lives of the mothers in the suburban group were not startlingly different from those of the mothers in the inner-city group. Though they certainly fared better in employment, income, and independence of welfare, the differences were not great. Interestingly, though, neither group of mothers felt more socially isolated than the other, which is to say that the poor, black mothers in the white, middle-class neighborhoods felt no more socially isolated than their counterparts in the city. It was not that the suburban mothers did not often feel isolated; they did. But so did the inner-city mothers, who often felt forced to choose self-isolation as a way of protecting their children from the dangers of the ghetto.
 
It was in the lives of the children as they grew that the important differences were noted. As might be expected, the several years immediately following their transfer to more advanced suburban schools proved trying for children from the inner city. They had much to catch up on—in many cases years of work—because their previous schools had simply not been teaching at the same level. After three or four years, however, their performances improved markedly. They began to do as well compared to their suburban peers as their inner-city counterparts were doing compared to their inner-city peers. To express it another way, if black inner-city kids had gotten A’s in the inner-city, they were now making A’s in the suburbs; those with B’s in the inner-city had B’s in the suburbs, and so on. The children had “jumped the track” from ghetto educational standards to suburban educational standards.
 
Some of these children have now been followed for over twenty years, and the differences between the two groups continue to be astonishing. Far more children in the suburban group graduated from high school, ten times as many matriculated into four-year colleges, and, of those that did, there were proportionately fewer college dropouts. As these children now move into adulthood, similar differences are being found in their employment histories and income levels. While their roads through the suburbs were sometimes bumpy, and while not everyone succeeded, a high percentage of these former ghetto kids were moving out. For them, the cycle of generational poverty had been broken.
 
There are several conditions in the study that should be noted. First, only one or two families were moved into any particular suburban neighborhood. This was an important condition because it did not allow the children—especially the adolescents—to congregate and maintain a ghetto subculture in their new neighborhood or school. Children were essentially forced to integrate themselves into a suburban culture and leave their ghetto problems behind.
 
Second, their new neighbors knew nothing of their histories unless the new families chose to tell them. Neighbors were therefore allowed to form their own opinions of the newcomers without the prejudices that “the ghetto” immediately conjures.
 
Third, these black families were often integrated into white neighborhoods despite a considerable reluctance on the part of the black mothers. No one was forced to take the housing offered by the study, of course, but the very few who chose not to take housing offered to them were dropped from the study and had to move into the usual queues for inner-city housing. Since most African Americans understandably prefer to live in neighborhoods with something closer to a fifty-fifty racial mix, presumably most of these black families would have chosen to move into middle-class black or more integrated neighborhoods. In all probability, their children would have done just as well or better in affluent black neighborhoods, but this has not been tested.
 
These results must challenge those of us who blame individuals or their families for the frequent failures of the inner city. Take the families out of the inner city, the Gautreaux Project strongly suggests, and they will do as well as any ordinary range of families might. The Gautreaux Project is now being replicated in five cities across the United States in a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program called Moving to Opportunity. Since the participants only finished moving into their new homes in 1999, no experimental results are yet available. Affluent communities have in some cases reacted negatively to such projects, however, creating significant obstacles to the establishment of similar programs elsewhere. Public protest at a site chosen by HUD in Baltimore led Congress to eliminate funding for a planned expansion of the program. A similar non-HUD program in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., was canceled when neighbors objected to moving
one
low-income family into their affluent neighborhood.
 
MENDING THE SAFETY NET
 
In the absence of real desegregation, the task of eliminating American poverty will certainly be very difficult. It would be possible, however, to design a social insurance system that would lift the income of most poor Americans above the poverty level. The following is a proposal that, I think, could be accepted by a majority of Americans. Since it involves only one new program (favored in reliable polls by a large majority of Americans
1
) and an expansion of three currently existing ones, the proposal seems politically feasible.
 
First, the new program: universal health coverage. People cannot move out of poverty unless health care is provided to all Americans. Health insurance in the United States is currently largely employer-based, although fewer and fewer employers now offer it and still fewer offer fully paid family coverage. Most low-wage employers do not provide health insurance, and those that do often require unaffordable co-payments. On their own, low-income, working-class, and even middle-class people simply cannot afford family health care premiums that average more than $7,000 a year. With one out of six Americans currently uninsured and the trend away from employer-sponsored coverage, the only reasonable option seems to be some form of national health insurance. Congressman James McDermott, a physician from the state of Washington, has repeatedly introduced a proposal in the House of Representatives for a “single-payer plan” that would provide universal coverage to all Americans without increasing total health care costs for the country. Sixty to eighty members of the House have usually signed on to this bill.
2
 
Like the Canadian system mentioned in the previous chapter, a single-payer plan would make the United States government into the sole “insurance company” to offer health care. Regardless of what one thinks of it in other areas, the federal government handles insurance very efficiently and cheaply. Social Security operates with an administrative overhead of less than 3 percent compared to more than 25 percent for combined overhead and profit at private insurance companies. Doctors would remain in private practice and still bill the “insurance company,” but there would be only one company to bill, the government. The plan would be administered on the state or regional level, and fee-for-service rates would be negotiated between state governments and physician representatives every year.
 
Such a shift would have a powerful impact on the insurance industry, and that has, of course, created strong political opposition to such a plan. There would certainly be some negative effect on the economy as private industry lost jobs that were only partially offset by new government hiring, but the increased efficiency and universal coverage would certainly be worth it.
3
 
The administrative savings from such a plan would be enormous. Not only would government overhead be far less than private insurance company overhead, but administrative costs would also be less for doctors and hospitals. The current Byzantine system of private insurance—in which different policies exclude different conditions from coverage and pay varying amounts for conditions they do cover—is an expensive bureaucratic nightmare for health-care providers. In separate studies the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget demonstrated that the administrative savings of a single-payer plan would be enough to provide comprehensive health coverage for all of the uninsured in the country. In other words, we could give everyone access to comprehensive health care for the same total cost that now leaves over 43 million people uninsured!
4
 
When polled, Americans overwhelmingly favor such a plan. Typical is a
USA Today
/Harris poll from November 23, 1998, in which 77 percent of the general public and 53 percent of employers agree that “government should provide quality medical care to all adults.” As the
Wall Street Journal
indicated in a 1998 article, two-thirds of Americans said they believe that “the government [should] guarantee everyone the best and most advanced health care that technology can supply.”
5
Even when it was suggested that such coverage might raise taxes by $2,000 a year (probably an overly high estimate), almost half were still supporters of the plan. “The fact that almost half of the public is willing to pay $2,000 extra to guarantee access to others is striking,” noted the
Journal
.
6
BOOK: Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen
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