The result is this book, for which I make no claim to originality. Quite the opposite. What I’ve tried to do is take the work of many scholars and journalists—often long, sometimes inspiring, but also sometimes dry or written for academic peers—and condense the essence into a single, short work that might explain urban poverty to anyone: exactly the book that in all those rushed years of doctoring I might have longed for and used. Complex as urban poverty and the behaviors that surround it might seem, there is, in fact, a certain basic simplicity to the problem and to the sorts of solutions that are (this perhaps surprised me more than anything) not hopelessly utopian and suitable only for an unimaginable, distant future. These solutions are, instead, remarkably close at hand, practical, and capable of being instituted were we only of a political mind to do so.
After a decade of unprecedented economic prosperity in the richest country the world has ever known, the poverty rate at the time of the 2000 Census was at its lowest in a generation. Nevertheless, 11.3 percent of all Americans, more than one out of every nine people, lived below an official poverty level that severely underestimates what most of us would consider poverty. Even more distressing, almost one out of six American children under eighteen (16.2 percent6) and almost one out of three of African-American children under eighteen (30.9 percent7) lived in poverty. Why?
One
BUILDING THE GHETTO: A HISTORY
Racial segregation has been a characteristic of American society for almost four hundred years, but the movement toward residential segregation so familiar to us today began less than a century ago. Before 1910, urban African Americans were far more likely to have whites as neighbors than other blacks.1 By the beginning of the 1950s, however, African-American urban neighborhoods were highly segregated, often physically isolated, densely concentrated, and fully formed. But these neighborhoods differed significantly from their modern counterparts. Though poorer on average than white neighborhoods, these black ghettos were, by and large, vibrant communities that “worked.” They were societies unto themselves that mirrored the larger society.
How did such neighborhoods come to be and what happened to them to create the abysmal conditions we know as the “urban ghetto”?
BLUEPRINT FOR THE GHETTO
Though a black elite of freedmen who earned their living as artisans and professionals had already established itself in the industrial cities of the North before the Civil War, African Americans began moving north in modest numbers only in the decades following the abolition of slavery. Former slaves in the South had been given no land upon emancipation, and so were forced into a sharecropping system in which workers “rented” land from white landowners with large holdings, paying their rents out of the year’s produce. While sharecropping was an improvement upon slavery, it still left the worker at the mercy of the landowner. Somehow, at the end of the year’s reckoning, the sharecropper was still in debt. Persistently poor, former slaves found themselves unable to accumulate enough money to buy land for themselves. In addition, southern agriculture was distinctly seasonal, so there were long periods of idleness, often enforced by contracts with the landowners that prohibited other forms of remunerated work, even during the off-season. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, African Americans also faced disenfranchisement, lynchings, legal segregation, and the first of a host of Jim Crow laws that ultimately left them with virtually none of the rights of citizenship.
Meanwhile, the industrialization of northern cities was in full swing, creating factory jobs at wages unheard of in the South. Initially, these jobs brought to the cities large numbers of immigrants, mostly European, mostly white. A trickle of largely uneducated African-American workers coming north could still find work, but they faced considerable discrimination in the cities, especially in employment. Their wages were lower than whites’, their chances for advancement were poor, and they were rarely allowed to join unions. Nevertheless, pressures in the South pushed and possibilities in the North pulled small numbers of African Americans into northern cities—only about 400,000 between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. In 1910, African Americans were no more than 5 percent of the population of any northern industrial city.
The influx of millions of European immigrants in the late 1800s created a patchwork of different ethnic communities in those cities. Since public transportation was virtually nonexistent and most new immigrants could not afford to move away from the places where they worked, the different ethnic enclaves where culture and language were familiar tended to cluster around the factories and sweatshops. Black “immigrants” from the South followed the same pattern.
These early immigrant clusters differed from ghettos2 in several respects. First, they were never homogeneous: many different nationalities coexisted in the same neighborhoods. Second, as factory workers became more affluent, they or their children moved out of the ghetto and dispersed into the general population. Third, as a result of this dispersion, a majority of any ethnic group almost always lived outside of identifiable clusters. Thus, while new immigrants continued to move into ethnic enclaves, families who had been there longer tended to disperse throughout the city.
By the early 1900s, however, the character of the African-American clusters in the North began to change. Blacks faced increasing discrimination in housing and public accommodations. Resistance to integration hardened, so it became more difficult to move out of the black enclaves. Continuing union opposition to black members and employer reluctance to train them as skilled workers in the factories kept African Americans in jobs that were “heavy, hot, dirty and low-paying.”3 The northern white press increasingly joined its Southern counterparts in portraying African Americans in stereotypical terms and as inferior to whites. Segregation became more pronounced. By 1910, despite the low numbers of blacks in northern cities and despite the fact that the average African American in those cities still lived in a ward that was less than 10 percent black, the outlines of the future black ghetto were beginning to emerge.
What came to be called “The Great Migration” of African Americans from the rural South began with the outbreak of World War I and a spike in the need for factory workers in the North. Although the United States did not join the war until 1917, American factories sold supplies to the Allied combatants from the beginning. Industry found a source of cheap labor in southern blacks and actively recruited them. Under the impact of the war and in the 1920s, between 1.5 and 2 million largely unskilled African Americans moved north; an additional 400,000 followed during the 1930s.
The Depression, of course, meant poverty for many people, but African-American workers, at the bottom of the pecking order, were the first to be let go and the hardest hit. As the economy gradually picked up during the later thirties, white workers were the first rehired, leaving disproportionate numbers of African Americans on relief or in federal work camps. To make matters worse, African Americans were largely excluded from the most important of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to alleviate poverty. Social Security and mandatory unemployment insurance, for example, were two of the central elements of social insurance introduced during the Depression, but they both specifically excluded domestics and agricultural workers. Since two-thirds of employed African Americans were then either domestics or agricultural workers, most blacks were not eligible for benefits. While the rest of the country was receiving significant Federal help moving out of poverty, African Americans were generally left out.
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), another important anti-poverty agency established during the Depression, guaranteed mortgages for up to 90 percent of the purchase price of a house, making down payments of 10 percent the norm, and it also extended the repayment period to twenty-five or thirty years. Previously, lenders had required down payments of up to one-third the cost of a home’s purchase price, making home ownership impossible for many. During the waning years of the Depression and again after World War II, FHA guarantees not only a
llowed families to become homeowners (and thus accumulate wealth), but also created local jobs and provided investment in the community. Between 1934, when the FHA was founded, and 1969, the percentage of families owning their own homes increased from 44 percent to 64 percent. Citing concerns that poorer black neighborhoods were not good financial risks, however, the FHA “redlined” almost all African-American communities, refusing to guarantee mortgages there. Private lenders followed suit. After World War II, the Veterans Administration used the same redlining policies, ensuring that returning African-American servicemen were excluded from the program. These policies excluding African Americans from government largesse lasted well into the 1960s.
Between 1940 and 1960, a staggering 4.5 million blacks left the South, a second Great Migration to northern cities. Because of segregation, however, the geographic area of the already established black ghettos in these cities expanded only slowly, leaving these new immigrants few options for housing. In addition, cities were increasingly turning to zoning in an effort to separate residential from industrial areas. When zoning choices had to be made among neighborhoods, the politically less powerful black communities were usually the losers, tending to be zoned as “industrial,” a label that often prohibited not only the construction of new residential construction but even the improvement of old residential buildings. The quality of life in these areas was already lower because of neighboring industry, and what housing stock existed tended to deteriorate easily. Non-blacks, of course, were free to look elsewhere and move out of their impoverished neighborhoods into better housing, but the realities of segregation forced African Americans to remain in these increasingly industrialized urban areas.
As a result, population density in the black ghetto increased steadily. By 1950, the average “isolation index” in northern ghettos was almost 90 percent, meaning that, on average, African Americans lived in neighborhoods that were 90 percent black, a level of segregation never experienced by any European ethnic group in the United States.
IMPOVERISHING THE GHETTO
Despite the crowding, northern black ghettos in 1950 were viable communities. Poverty created its share of social problems (the average income of African-American families then was only slightly more than half that of white families), and these neighborhoods were segregated racially, but, in spite of some degree of class separation within the black ghetto, neighborhoods were largely “vertically integrated.” Affluent, middle-class, working-class, and poor people all lived in relatively close proximity. Social organization was intact. Informal networks kept neighbors in touch with one another, while businesses, schools, churches, fraternal organizations, and volunteer organizations supported viable communities. Most people held jobs. Single-parent families were a distinct minority. Levels of violence were low. Education was valued.
To offer a personal example, my father directed a settlement house in the ghetto of St. Louis, Missouri, from 1946 to 1950. He tells of searching frequently for kids in trouble and—as a white man—having to run up and down the dark staircases of urban tenements late at night. He remembers no feelings of fear. There wasn’t, he says, anything to be afraid of.
A series of events over the next three decades, however, changed this situation radically, creating the modern black ghetto. The first of these events was the wholesale destruction of black neighborhoods by the federal Urban Renewal and the federal Interstate Highway programs. Urban renewal (then called “slum removal”) was initially meant to revive decaying inner-city neighborhoods by transforming them into new, architecturally interesting cultural, commercial, and residential centers. Again, because African Americans generally held less political power, black ghettos were often the chosen sites for slum removal. Significant parts of black ghettos were razed and rebuilt, often as magnets for business or tourism, such as the Loop in Chicago, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, or (somewhat later) the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. Not without justice were the slum renewal programs sometimes called “Negro removal.”
As part of urban renewal, the federal government provided money for the construction of some new public housing for those displaced by the changes. Reasoning that limited resources should go to the poor, Congress set strict income limits on who could live in these new housing “projects.” Functionally, this meant that the poorest members of the black ghetto were moved somewhere else in the city and segregated by class as well as by race, only intensifying their isolation from the larger society. The worst of these projects were high-rise towers that housed many people in small geographic areas. In addition, such public housing provided on average only one unit for every ten units destroyed. The rest of those evicted by urban renewal had to squeeze into whatever already overcrowded ghetto areas remained. One Chicago critic pointed out that since local residents “were already living in coal-bins, out-houses, and other cubbyholes of squalor,”4 there were few places left to squeeze into.
The Interstate Highway program instituted in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower repeated the process. As a network of superhighways meant to link the country together was blasted through cities, poor black areas were, not surprisingly, the first choices for disruption. Either an area would be razed and its former inhabitants removed, or a highway would be placed so as to create a physical boundary between the black ghetto and other areas of the city, further isolating its inhabitants.
The federally subsidized highway programs also facilitated the suburbanization of the North, contributing to the erosion of its cities. Increasingly affluent whites were eager to leave those cities, and the government subsidized this exodus by building roads that made daily access to urban workplaces from the suburbs far more feasible. FHA and Veterans Administration mortgage guarantees, more easily given for new housing in new neighborhoods and completely unavailable for black or mixed urban neighborhoods, encouraged (white) families with even modest incomes to invest in suburban home ownership. Between 1950 and 1970, seven million whites left center cities.5
The effects of this “white flight” were drastic, not only concentrating the population of poor African Americans in center cities, but also drawing jobs away from those same areas, especially jobs that paid a living wage.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States had become the overwhelming leader in worldwide manufacturing. Many of its factories were still located in the large cities of the North. They offered good employment, even for workers who entered the job market with little education and few skills. By this time, most unions accepted African Americans—there were also primarily black unions—and high levels of unionization in industry meant that jobs were secure, wages relatively high, and chances for advancement good if one stayed with the company. During the immediate post-World War II period, such blue-collar jobs were the primary way out of poverty for many African Americans.
Major structural changes in the global economy over the last four decades, however, have drastically altered that situation. After the destruction caused by World War II, the Europeans and Japanese gradually rebuilt their manufacturing sectors, which by the 1970s had begun to compete, often quite successfully, with American companies. In the later 1980s and 1990s, less developed countries like Korea and Taiwan expanded their manufacturing, too. By the turn of the millennium, American manufacturing was competing not only with the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut but also the former Eastern Bloc nations, Mexico, and Latin America.
Within the United States, changes in technology and transportation eliminated the need to locate factories in the middle of cities, so industry, too, joined the exodus to the suburbs. Rural areas in the North and the cities and suburbs in the Sun Belt of the Southwest also proved increasingly attractive to industry because land was cheaper, taxes lower, and unions far weaker. More recently, the development of large, transnational corporations able to create “global assembly lines” has led to further loss of manufacturing in the United States as “American” plants move to the Third World, where wages are drastically lower,
unions often nonexistent, environmental laws few, and expensive regulations to protect workers from harm seldom on the books, much less enforced.
With the increasing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing worldwide, moreover, many of the better-paying jobs that remain in the United States require higher levels of education. There are jobs for those who analyze data, write computer programs, manage people, administer organizations, or do financial planning. Increasingly, however, the bulk of jobs remaining for poorly trained or educated people are in the service sector—as domestics, janitors, clerks, salespeople, nursing aides, or cashiers—where wages have historically been low and benefits poor or nonexistent. To make matters worse, over the last thirty years, wages in the service sector have declined both in real dollars and relative to other sectors of the economy, so even full-time workers in such jobs now find it difficult to stay out of poverty.
A continuing pattern of residential segregation that is no less rigid for being informal makes it that much more difficult to find well-paying jobs outside of black areas. Yes, poor African Americans can get jobs in the suburbs, but only the most persistent succeed. Not only is discrimination in employment still a problem, but public transportation from the center city to the suburbs is also complicated, unreliable, and, most of all, time-consuming. Owning a car is too expensive for low-wage earners, especially for young men who must pay soaring urban insurance premiums.
Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Page 2