Shelf Life: The Other War We’re Not Winning

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I’ve been impressed with recent indie-press coverage of poverty and inequality, though the perspectives of the poor themselves remain surprisingly difficult to find.

From Rags to . . . Rags

“The ghetto appears to be inherited,” writes Patrick Sharkey in the Boston Review’s special section on urban poverty (Jan.-Feb. 2008). The inequalities that stifle upward mobility “fade extremely slowly”; the urban segregation imposed by decades of unenforced fair-housing rights, race-based incarceration, and disinvestment in inner-city communities will not be eradicated by housing vouchers that move some poor people to marginally better neighborhoods. Instead of asking “How can we dismantle the ghetto?” Sharkey writes, urban policy makers might also ask, “How can we make the ghetto less pernicious?”

The Christian social-activism magazine Sojourners (Dec. 2007) reports on one possibility: equitable development, a community planning approach that addresses regional disparities. “The neighborhoods we call home determine the affordability of our housing, the quality of our public schools, our access to jobs, and the availability of public transportation,” the article notes, and poor neighborhoods often suffer shortcomings in all those areas. In inner-city San Diego, equitable development meant getting low-income community members involved in improving public safety, combating neighborhood blight, and tailoring a 10-acre commercial real estate project to their needs by including a grocery store, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations.

Such projects are encouraging because for most people born into poverty, our society’s long-treasured rags-to-riches narrative is a mere fairy tale. A recent study by the Economic Mobility Project, an initiative coordinated by the Pew Charitable Trusts, found that 42 percent of children born into the poorest families remain in the lowest income bracket as adults. (Of those born into the wealthiest families, 39 percent will stay at the top.) As Dissent points out (Winter 2008), the odds are heavily stacked against the poorest African American children, who face a 54 percent chance of economic immobility (compared to 31 percent for white children born to the poorest parents).

The smart, straightforward newsletter Poverty & Race considers the sources of racial inequality. A recent piece mapped out the long-term effects of incarceration on low-income families (Nov.-Dec. 2007). For starters, the household is short one wage earner, and there are expensive collect calls from prison to pay for. Extended family members often make sacrifices of their own to help make ends meet. And then there’s the fact that a person’s “lifetime earning potential” is significantly lower when he or she has been incarcerated. Ultimately, “incarceration inhibits capital accumulation and reduces the ability of parents to pass wealth on to their children and grandchildren through inheritance and gifts,” taking a significant shot at the economic mobility of that family’s future generations.

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