White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  This was Lakia’s first experience living in concentrated poverty. She felt that about half the residents were people like herself, who were “trying hard to do things right,” she said. The other half had succumbed to hopelessness. “A lot of people there had lost a sense of life,” Lakia said of residents who took or sold drugs or engaged in other destructive behavior. “You have to understand,” she elaborated, “some people do things because they don’t see any other way to survive.”

  Lakia tried to make the best of the hotel-shelter. She organized a dance group for young girls who lived there and found herself ministering to residents. She became an advocate for women in the shelter, particularly those who had been abused domestically or sexually. She is still haunted by the day she watched as an infant was taken from a mother, purportedly because of the deeds of a violent boyfriend.

  The Barnetts moved to DC General after Lakia complained about health risks to her children. This large shelter on the premises of a former hospital, which has since closed, “felt like a prison,” she said. The security guards and some staff were “nasty” and treated residents like they were “the lowest,” she stated. “A lot of people have been misunderstood because they are homeless. They have feelings, ambition, goals but they didn’t know how to execute” to achieve them. At the shelter, she said, “there was no room to see the individual, to find out what passions or vision they had to make themselves better.” The attitude of the staff was “just go take anything” for a job, even though working at a McDonald’s, she said, might not be a sustainable path. “No one would know from my being homeless that I could publish two books, host my own radio show, or start a [theater] movement” for women, she said proudly of her journey.1

  The decaying DC General homeless shelter was infested by rats, and bugs that bit children. A baby died there. An eight-year-old, Relisha Rudd, was taken from the building by a janitor in 2014 and was never found. An investigation revealed more than a dozen claims of shelter employees sexually abusing tenants.2 Mayor Muriel Bowser closed the shelter in 2018, replacing it with six smaller facilities scattered throughout the city, including one erected in affluent Ward Three, over the objections of some locals. While living at DC General, Lakia learned to tap the resources and networks of service providers, particularly an onsite legal clinic.

  Georgetown’s Health Justice Alliance set out to improve outcomes for poor families by addressing multiple social determinants of their health, including stable housing and quality education. A Georgetown Law student helped Lakia advocate for her children. Both sons have dyslexia and other disabilities. The student-lawyer helped Lakia negotiate the DC school lottery. In DC’s segregated school system, a “great” school meant a whiter school than Lakia was used to. The elementary school her sons had attended had a way of “dropping the ball,” she said. Through the lottery, they accessed better options. Her younger son, Jermel, was placed at School Within A School Elementary, its child-centered teaching philosophy inspired by the Reggio Emilia schools of Italy, which Lakia described as “really great.” The school had more of a “mixture” of students and more “structure” than where he had been, she said.

  Lakia’s advocate helped her acquire an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for both her sons. The federal government grants about $12 billion annually to states and localities to pay for services for the 10 percent of American children with special needs. Federal law gives children with special needs procedural protections like the IEP, in which the state acknowledges a child’s disability and commits in writing annually to the services it will provide to help the child meet stated educational goals. Affluent families are more likely to know about the program and invoke the federal right to sue school districts to enforce their individual rights.3 With IEP status, Lakia’s sons received tailored services and transportation to school on a small yellow bus dedicated to special-needs children. This, and the caring adult aide who rode the bus to look out for children, felt like a godsend. With Georgetown’s help, Lakia also applied for and received assistance under the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program for Jermel, who has a hearing disability and developmental issues that the IEP process helped identify. Lakia said that because of her family’s size and her son’s SSI status, she also received another miracle, a HUD-funded housing choice voucher.

  The District of Columbia’s waiting list for this voucher program stretches to nearly forty thousand people. Lakia was informed that she had only six months to sign a lease to use the voucher before it would expire. She launched into action, searching on Craigslist and other applications on her cellphone. In the District, unlike most states, a local law prevents discrimination by source of income in real estate transactions.4 Using the voucher was “funny” Lakia said, in the quizzical sense, “Some would try to charge us double once they heard you had a voucher.”

  She persevered and discovered an affordable place for rent a few blocks from million-dollar homes on Capitol Hill. The owner told her the unit would be ready in a few weeks and she was open to taking the voucher. Lakia promised her children they would be in a home by Christmas. She cried with anguish when the landlord withdrew, complaining about the paperwork associated with the program, and stopped communicating with her. Another landlord for a listing she liked told her baldly that they did not accept vouchers. Another told her that they had a minimum-income requirement. All of these responses were potential violations of local fair-housing law.

  A Georgetown Law student filed a complaint on Lakia’s behalf against two landlords through the DC Office of Human Rights, then pursued mediation. Lakia told her story to the mediator with plaintive power and received a damage settlement for discrimination. Meanwhile, the expiration date for signing a lease with the voucher was approaching. Georgetown requested an extension based on the repeated discrimination she encountered. The local housing authority refused. Instead it did something that Georgetown Law faculty advisor Yael Cannon tells me she had never seen it do for any voucher holder. They assigned a team of people to help Lakia, gave her a list of rental vacancies with landlords who accepted vouchers, and had someone to drive her to see them. All of the listings were east of the Anacostia River in very poor neighborhoods.

  The home that the Barnetts moved to was “the most decent property” they were shown, Lakia said. Despite the sturdiness of their block, she says they live “ten minutes by foot from places where people get shot.” She also says that the neighborhood’s Garfield Elementary School “is not great” and that she would not send her children there. All of the children at Garfield are economically disadvantaged. To its credit, the school has used Title I federal funding to provide a comprehensive, year-round program of learning, raising student achievement on standardized tests by about 50 percent in recent years. But less than half of Garfield students are meeting or exceeding standardized expectations. At the time of our interview, the school was ranked a color-coded red “priority,” the lowest, in state-monitored categories of school performance known as ESEA.5 Lakia feels that her sons’ disabilities have been a blessing, a source of leverage to get services and access to quality apart from where they live. She dreams of one day returning to suburban Maryland, to a more pastoral space.

  The Barnetts’ housing search mirrors that of low-income families studied in Seattle. Raj Chetty and a team of researchers sought to understand why it is that low-income families tend to end up in low-income hoods. All of the participants in this randomized experiment had housing vouchers like the one that Lakia obtained. Some families received personalized counseling and assistance in searching for homes, and others in a control group were left to their own devices. The experiment debunked the myth that poor people live in poor areas merely out of preference. Researchers, reviewing extensive quantitative and qualitative data, concluded that difficulty in overcoming barriers in accessing housing in high-opportunity spaces was a central driver of residential segregation. More than half of low-income voucher holders that received highly pers
onalized housing search assistance moved to high-opportunity areas compare to only 14 percent of those in the control group. Chetty and his colleagues concluded that the barriers to income integration for these families were most effectively removed by high-touch personal interventions to support individual families.6

  Lakia Barnett

  The nation’s legendary housing mobility programs, run by experienced nonprofits in Chicago, Dallas, and Baltimore, provide precisely this kind of personalized services to enable poor folk to have real choices about where to live.7 It is what Lakia sought for her family and received from Georgetown’s Health Justice Alliance—a humanized approach that responded to her family’s specific challenges and enabled them to stabilize. But Lakia’s family was denied their choice to live in a high-opportunity hood. The ideology of choice or freedom, like the American Dream, is largely denied to descendants. Those who live in affluent space and believe they have earned everything they have, including the right to exclude, participate in this false, limited ideology of freedom for an advantaged few. It helps explain the seeming permanence of racism and its structures. Those who benefit from the architecture of segregation can justify living on high ground by pathologizing low-income people who try to cross the moat.

  Garfield Heights, where the Barnetts landed, is overwhelmingly Black. A child born between 1978 and 1983 at Lakia’s current address was not likely to rise above her birth circumstances as an adult. Researchers at the US Census Bureau and Harvard and Brown Universities developed the Opportunity Atlas, mapping adult outcomes for every census tract in the country for the children born as the nation transitioned from presidents Carter to Reagan. The Atlas’s measured adult outcomes for children born in Garfield Heights were a median household income of $21,000 and a very high incarceration rate of 6.2 percent, more than 1 in 20 adults.8

  The Barnetts live in the zip code 20020. The first rental, promised and then denied to them, was on Capitol Hill in Lincoln Park, which straddles the 20002 and 20003 zip codes. Lincoln Park surrounds a sprawling park of the same name, where Union soldiers were hospitalized during the Civil War. For now, a controversial sculpture of Abraham Lincoln emancipating a last, kneeling fugitive slave stands at the east end of this expanse, planned by Pierre L’Enfant in his original design for the city. At the opposite west end stands a bronze sculpture of Black American educator-activist Mary McLeod Bethune. She hands her legacy to two Black children, and her words echo at the sculpture’s base: “I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another.”

  When Bethune’s likeness was installed, many residents in the surrounding neighborhood were Black. Today, Lincoln Park, due east of the US Capitol, is an affluent, majority-white neighborhood. In an online search in 2019, the cheapest property for sale in Lincoln Park was a one-bedroom, 805-square-foot condo for $415,000, with an estimated mortgage of $1,700 per month, the price for a singleton to live in a neighborhood with an excellent elementary school. Maury Elementary in Lincoln Park has a GreatSchools.org rating of nine out of ten for its students’ “above average” performance on standardized tests and yearly academic improvement. It also received effusive five-star ratings from many satisfied parents.9 The school performs well above the District average in standardized tests.10 Racially and economically Maury Elementary is worlds apart from Garfield Elementary, the neighborhood school that the Barnett family was able to bypass only with the determined assistance of Georgetown Law students.

  THE EFFECTS OF CONCENTRATED POVERTY

  Only about 30 percent of Black and Latinx families reside in middle-class neighborhoods where less than half of the people are poor. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of white and Asian families live in environs where most of their neighbors are not poor. The majority of whites and Asians live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate below 14 percent. As urban sociologist John Logan put it, “It is especially true for African Americans and Hispanics that their neighborhoods are often served by the worst-performing schools, suffer the highest crime rates, and have the least valuable housing stock in the metropolis.”11

  Five decades of social science research demonstrate what common sense tells us. Neighborhoods with high poverty, limited employment, underperforming schools, distressed housing, and violent crime depress life outcomes. They create a closed loop of systemic disadvantage such that failure is common and success aberrational. Even the most motivated child may not be able to overcome unsafe streets, family dysfunction, a lack of mentors and networks that lead to jobs and internships, or the general miasma of depression that can pervade high-poverty places.

  One study found that a high-poverty neighborhood virtually guarantees downward mobility.12 Living in a severely disadvantaged neighborhood impedes the development of verbal cognitive ability in children, correlates to a loss of a year of learning for Black students, and lowers high school graduation rates by as much as 20 percent.13 Disadvantaged neighborhoods have been found to raise stress and levels of depression, independent of the impact of an individual’s personal stressors like poverty, joblessness, or family crises.14

  Children in poor neighborhoods are especially vulnerable because they deal with a confluence of multiple, chronic stressors.15 As Douglas Massey summarized, the “spatial concentration of disadvantage . . . predicts a plethora of . . . maladies, including high rates of violence, crime, infant mortality, and homicide and low levels of life expectancy, public trust, interpersonal connection and political efficacy.”16 Black neighborhoods are also much more likely than others to contain or be close to toxic environmental hazards like trash incinerators and waste dumps.17 Poor Black and Latinx neighborhoods have high rates of pollution relative to other places.18 Formerly redlined hoods are now five degrees hotter in summer, on average, than areas once favored for conventional mortgages. Black and brown hoods lack trees and parks that cool bodies and the air. In some cities, the difference in summer temperature between the hood and favored space rises to twelve degrees, while a one-degree increase in heat increases the risk of death by 2.5 percent.19

  Living in the hood is life-shortening. Recent research suggests that Black Americans are uniquely exposed to neighborhood stress that shortens telomeres—the repetitive nucleotic sequences at the ends of chromosomes that protect genetic material from deterioration. The normal process of telomere shortening that comes with aging is accelerated by environmental stress. This phenomenon subjects Black Americans to greater risk of disease and death throughout their lifetimes. Prolonged exposure to the cumulative deprivations of segregated neighborhoods increases risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other disease. It has also been shown to undermine memory, mental health, and cognitive functioning.20

  In Baltimore, for example, life expectancy in poor Black neighborhoods lags that in wealthier white environs by twenty years. In the Clifton-Berea neighborhood, where The Wire was filmed, residents can expect to live to age sixty-seven, the same as in Rwanda and about the same as in other poor Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Chicago, and beyond. Among the causes for health disparities in Baltimore, as identified by an Atlantic reporter, were increased exposure to trauma, lead poisoning and allergens of poor-quality housing, fast-food “swamps,” and healthy-food deserts.21 Large supermarkets stock more healthy foods at lower prices than grocery and convenience stores, yet predominantly Black census tracts have the fewest supermarkets among all census tracts.22

  Numerous studies correlate high lead exposure with impoverished Black neighborhoods. There is no safe level for exposure to lead, which has been linked to irreversibly reduced IQ and increased infant mortality, anxiety and depression, hypertension, impulsivity and attention deficit disorder, aggression, delinquency, crime, and homicide. Average blood lead levels are highest in poor communities of color; the primary sources are aged water pipes, gasoline exhaust, smelting plants, and chipping paint.23

  The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, a hypersegregated, majority-Black city,
underscores how concentrated Black poverty can lead to toxic inequality. Concentrated Blackness, once created, stands apart. It becomes easier for those in power to make distinctions, to treat people geographically confined differently than decision makers might treat their own family, neighbors, or perceived in-group.

  Flint, like other communities in Michigan, enjoyed clean water from a Great Lake, via the Detroit water system. Upon his election, Republican governor Rick Snyder sought and signed legislation expanding powers of emergency managers. He invoked this law to supplant democratically elected local officials, mainly in majority-Black cities.24 Snyder declared a financial emergency and appointed emergency managers in Flint. It appears that they, in turn, made the decision to draw water from the polluted Flint River to cut costs.25 Emergency managers also decided not to treat the polluted water with an anticorrosive, creating a man-made crisis. The pipes corroded, leached lead, and poisoned children and families. A General Motors plant stopped using Flint’s water because it was too corrosive for car parts. Yet state officials insisted for over a year that the water was safe to drink, despite knowing about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed a dozen people and undisclosed tests of a Flint resident’s water that showed extraordinarily high lead levels.26

  The crisis hit hardest in Flint’s poorest and “Blackest” wards. Again, no amount of lead exposure is considered safe. Yet elevated blood lead levels for young children in Wards Five, Six, and Seven of Flint rose from 4 percent before the crisis to 10 percent after, levels that should shock the conscience and are unheard of for children in affluent white space. In Genesee County municipalities outside of Flint, the incidence of elevated blood lead levels was just 0.7 percent before the crisis and 1.2 percent after. Peter Muennig, a professor of public health at Columbia University, estimates that elevated blood lead levels found in over eight thousand Flint children will result in about $400 million in social costs. A task force commissioned by Governor Snyder concluded that the long-term damage of lead exposure “will necessitate sustained investments in education, public and mental health, juvenile justice, and nutrition needs over the next 10 to 20 years.”27 But the distributional politics of segregation does not augur well for such investments being made or sustained.