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6 Ghetto Poverty and Federal Policies and Programs
Pages 223-252

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From page 223...
... The United States does not have a true urban policy in the sense of a set of comprehensive federal policies and programs that explicitly try to influence the size, location, or internal spatial structure of urban settlements as such (Mills, 1987~. As a result, private market forces play the predominant role in shaping urban areas.
From page 224...
... FEDERAL POLICIES AND PROGRAMS THAT PROMOTE OR FAIL TO PREVENlr INCOME SEGREGATION The research on federal housing policies and programs, policies against housing discrimination, and transportation, economic development, and welfare programs is reviewed in this section for evidence of effects on the geographic concentration of poverty. Federal policies and programs have tended to promote concentration indirectly, for example, by encouraging the suburbanization of the better-off while having little or no direct effect in the opposite direction (e.g., through increasing low-income housing in the suburbs or commuting of the poor across city lines)
From page 225...
... Federal Housing Subsidy Programs The 1.3 million units in low-rent public housing projects account for a third of all publicly subsidized housing units, and most of them72 percent are located in central cities (Rasmussen, 1980:261~. These projects probably account for many of the census tracts that had poverty rates of 60 percent or more in 1980, and, to the extent that public housing residents are less mobile than other residents of high-poverty tracts, contributed to the large increase in concentrated poverty between 1970 and 1980.
From page 226...
... An evaluation using 1979 data found that, while 88 percent of the residents of central-city projects had come from the central city, 40 percent of the residents of projects built in the inner suburbs had come from the central city, which resulted in a net shift of 10 percent of households in the program from the central cities to the suburbs. Participating black households moved to census tracts in which the minority share of the population was 19 percentage points less, on average.
From page 227...
... In the absence of controls, however, the possibility cannot be ruled out that low-income movers without Section 8 housing certificates were just as likely to go to less segregated areas as the control group members were in the housing-allowance experiment. Historically, federal housing supply programs for low-income households have contributed to concentrated poverty in central cities because they were more likely to be located in neighborhoods that were already poor, although recent programs have tended to be more dispersed within central cities and within most metropolitan areas.
From page 228...
... The indices for black-white dissimilarity were especially high in the five northeastern and midwestern metropolitan areas whose central cities experienced large increases in concentrated poverty during the 1970s. On average (unweighted for size)
From page 229...
... Black incomes grew rapidly in the 1960s, from 55 percent of white incomes, on average, to 64 percent, but segregation levels increased overall and in neighborhoods at each income level; the proportion of blacks living in lower income census tracts fell only from 85 percent to 80 percent (McKinney and Schnare, 1986:~bles 4, 5, 64. In the 1970s the ratio of median black income to median white income fell from 61 percent to 58 percent, yet the movement of blacks out of lower income census tracts and central cities increased greatly.
From page 230...
... Reducing the income segregation of minorities presumably would require policies and programs that increase the supply of affordable housing as well as overcome racial discrimination in higher income neighborhoods in the central cities and suburbs. Transportation In 1980 federal assistance accounted for a major portion of government spending on urban transportation: 40 percent of capital expenditures on urban highways, 80 percent of capital assistance for urban mass transit, and 30 percent of mass transit operating subsidies (Gomez-Ibanez, 1985:183~.
From page 231...
... Mass Transit The federal government became involved in the support of urban mass transportation lo help cities maintain their financially failing mass transit systems and discourage the use of private automobiles (Hilton, 1974:3~. Mass transit has also been expected to increase the mobility of the poor (as well as the elderly and the handicapped)
From page 232...
... . Another study of public transit ridership in 1970 and 1980 in the 25 largest urbanized areas found that there was a substantial gain in the number of workers using mass transit to commute from suburban homes to central-city jobs, but it was more than offset by the loss of centrality
From page 233...
... workers using mass transit (Joint Center for Political Studies, 1985~. There were also losses in the number of "reverse commuters," those using public transit to get from central-city residences to suburban jobs, and in the number of workers using public transit to commute within the suburbs Amble 6-1~.
From page 234...
... Paratransit modes include taxis, car and van pools, and dial-a-ride services. During the late 1970s, the Urban Mass Transportation Administration funded a number of demonstrations and case study evaluations of user subsidies, usually shared-ride taxi services for elderly and handicapped people.
From page 235...
... Tax relief has relatively little capacity to compensate for higher labor costs, higher construction or site acquisition costs, higher transport costs, or higher energy costs. Firms that can be influenced to locate in or near areas of concentrated poverty will tend to bring jobs that cannot break the cycle of concentrated poverty.
From page 236...
... In short, the prospects for using public intervention to create economic development in areas of concentrated poverty as a means of increasing the employment of the very poor are not promising, although the strategy may work in certain situations. Welfare Income maintenance transfers, which are mostly federally financed (including Aid to Families With Dependent Children [AFDC]
From page 237...
... . The influence of these interstate differences in benefit levels on the migration patterns of the poor has been a much-studied subject.
From page 238...
... It is, however, impossible to tell from the net migration data in the published reports on high-poverty areas how much the in-migration of poor people from outside the central city was replacing some of the poor people who left concentrated poverty tracts, thereby keeping concentration levels higher than they would have
From page 239...
... found that welfare recipients, especially AFDC recipients, are significantly less likely to move to another state. That study controlled for characteristics common to welfare recipients that also act to inhibit outmigration (racial minority status, having young children, less education, receiving public housing assistance, and not being in the labor force)
From page 240...
... Wealthy white households tended to leave or avoid high-expenditure localities, apparently because of the high tax rates usually associated with high public expenditures (Cebula, 1974, 1979; Greenwood and Sweetland, 1972; Pack, 1973~. In summary, whether or not the greater availability of welfare, social, health, and other services for poor people in central cities relative to suburbs or rural areas played a role in attracting poor in-migrants during the 1970s, it may have played an inadvertent role in slowing the out-migration of the poor (see Kasarda, 1985, 1988~.
From page 241...
... . Given that the poor and minorities are concentrated in central cities, that public schools are locally controlled by each community in a metropolitan area, and that federal policies do not require the transportation of poor students to nonpoor schools across community boundaries, it is not surprising that central-city schools have a disproportionate share of poor students.
From page 242...
... 3~. In the subsequent upturn in test scores, minority students, students in schools with a high proportion of minorities, and students in disadvantaged urban areas made greater relative gains than other students (Congressional Budget Office, 1986:Ch.
From page 243...
... Any impact on the concentration of poverty would be long term, however, and the magnitude of that impact would depend on how large and well targeted the programs were on poor families in areas of concentrated poverty and on how well designed and well delivered the programs were. As already noted, Head Start reaches about 20 percent of poor children aged three to five years; Chapter 1 reaches about 25 percent of all school-aged children at some point.
From page 244...
... In the long run, the costs of the program were far outweighed by the higher income and reduced dependence on welfare payments of the AFDC recipients and by the higher income and reduced criminal activity of the former drug users (Hollister et al., 1984:Table 8.6~. The Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, which was created to run and evaluate the Supported Work Demonstration, has subsequently conducted experimental evaluations of a number of state-level programs aimed at increasing the employment of AFDC recipients.
From page 245...
... Fourth, after 1968, fair housing laws helped nonpoor minorities to leave ghetto areas, which contributed to the dramatic increase in concentrated poverty among central-city minorities during the 1970s. Fifth, some federal policies intended to increase the mobility of poor families, such as housing vouchers and mass transit subsidies, have not had the expected effect of reducing residential or income segregation.
From page 246...
... 1978 The Urban Impacts of Federal Policies Vot 3, Fiscal Conditions. Report No.
From page 247...
... Draft research report submitted to the Urban Mass Transportation Administration. Clark, Rebecca 1988 Outmigration Among Welfare Recipients.
From page 248...
... 1980 The Urban Impacts of Federal Policies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
From page 249...
... Nag B~n~ck ha.: caller far Urban Policy fib. Spoil, Tie E
From page 250...
... 1987 The Impact of Federal Housing Programs on Black Americans. Background report prepared for the Committee on the Status of Black Americans, National Research Council, Washington, D.C.
From page 251...
... Pp. 24~263 in The Urban Impacts of Federal Policies, Norman J
From page 252...
... 1977b The Urban Impacts of Federal Policies.


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