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7 Conclusions
Pages 253-270

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From page 253...
... FINDINGS As we have shown in this volume, several factors have caused variations among cities in ghetto poverty: changes in poverty and unemployment rates, differential in- and out-migration of poor and nonpoor people, and changes in racial and family composition. (Again, the term ghetto refers to any neighborhood with an overall poverty rate of 40 percent or more; the level of ghetto poverty is the proportion of poor people living in ghettos)
From page 254...
... Thus, growth in the poor black population and in the numbers of female-headed families could have contributed to some of the increases in concentration. Multivariate analysis of ghettos, holding boundaries constant between 1970 and 1980, shows that the economic fortunes of residents in persistently poor neighborhoods improved when the economies of the metropolitan areas encompassing them improved in terms of growth in family income or a decrease in unemployment rates (see Chapter 3~.
From page 255...
... These characteristics included age, race, and, depending on the sample of cities, education and household composition (see Chapter 3~. Effects of Ghetto Poverty This study explored the extent and location of ghetto poverty as well as the question of whether poor people living in ghettos are worse off than poor people living elsewhere.
From page 256...
... These studies, reviewed in Chapter 4, have found some significant contextual effects of neighborhood poverty and racial characteristics; however, the more exogenous effects were statistically controlled, the smaller the magnitude of the neighborhood effects.The effects also vary by type of behavior and time period. For example, although a neighborhood's distance from or proximity to employment opportunities did not affect the current employment chances of residents, a study of the effects of one's neighbors' race and income on one's earnings 10 years later found significant differences.
From page 257...
... Other studies reviewed in Chapter 4 show that the family income of students or the racial composition of a high school has little effect on the educational aspirations and subsequent educational attainment of seniors, because the positive effects on the aspirations of poor seniors in wealthy schools are cancelled out by their lower grades and class standings. Relatively little is known about neighborhood effects on some kinds of behavior such as teenage crime, teenage sexual behavior, and the achievement of minority high school students-even when the socioeconomic or racial composition of a neighborhood or school appear from the limited existing research to be important.
From page 258...
... In either case, as discussed in Chapter 2, determining the existence and extent of an urban underclass in ghettos involves sorting out the relationships among ghetto poverty, persistent and intergenerational poverty, and underclass behaviors. Data adequate to determine the existence of an urban underclass do not exist; decennial census data cannot settle the issue.
From page 259...
... Most of these studies have found little evidence that attitudes cause poverty or welfare dependence (Hill et al., 1985; O'Neill et al., 1984) , although studies using the NLS have tended to find that some attitudinal measures toward work did have a significant relationship to subsequent success in the labor market, and vice versa (Andrisani and Parnes, 1983~.
From page 260...
... The committee concludes that some ghetto residents would not be able to take full advantage of tight labor markets; this conclusion implies that education and training and other supply-side policies may be important in reducing ghetto poverty and unemployment. Third, the committee has documented some negative effects of living in ghettos.
From page 261...
... The committee thus concludes that the delivery and therefore the effectiveness of current antipoverty programs can be significantly undercut by ghetto poverty. The committee believes that discriminatory barriers preventing mobility to better neighborhoods should be deliberately undermined by federal policies and programs.
From page 262...
... Even if overall economic conditions improve, demographic changes among the population in poverty, especially the growth of families headed by single women, who are least helped by economic growth, will keep poverty rates somewhat higher than they would have been even with economic growth (0.1 percentage points a year, according to a simulation by GottschaLk and Danziger, 1984~. The macroeconomic approach is also limited by the effects of structural economic change affecting labor markets the location of jobs and the levels of education and skill requirements.
From page 263...
... . ~~~ -- I ~ ~ -- I -- I- -- r -- o~ ~ ~ youth that facilitate the transition from school to work; Investments in health, especially teenage pregnancy prevention, prenatal care, nutrition, childhood immunization and other preventive health programs, and prevention and treatment of substance abuse; Employment and training programs for adults, including job search, job matching, job seeking and employability skills training, specific skills training, work experience, and supported work.
From page 264...
... Increasing Mobility Some findings reported in this study that being poor in a ghetto may have a negative effect, and that some federal policies have had an indirect effect of concentrating the poor and minorities in central cities suggest that the spatial implications of government policies, especially the effects of government programs on poverty concentrations, must be considered carefully. For example, poor people living in ghettos may be less likely to benefit from federal antipoverty programs, because these programs may not be designed to deal with such a high proportion of poor people in a given area.
From page 265...
... Mobility means little unless it leads to a higher~uality social environment and to improved economic opportunity. This could be accomplished either by enabling poor ghetto residents to move beyond contiguous neighborhoods to stable, higher-income areas, or by stabilizing contiguous neighborhoods by consciously encouraging the building of working-class and mixed-income housing that could absorb out-migrants from ghettos and otherwise attempting to keep them from turning into new ghettos, or both.
From page 266...
... The problem of ghetto poverty, however, is one area in which place-oriented policies provide few, if any, additional benefits for the poor, and that could potentially have the unfortunate effect of inhibiting their mobility.
From page 267...
... First, the Bureau of the Census should continue to produce statistics on urban poverty concentration from the decennial censuses, as it did for the 1970 and 1980 censuses (Bureau of the Census, 1973, 1985) , to enable researchers to track trends in ghetto poverty over a longer period of time.
From page 268...
... Bane, Mary Jo, and Paul ~ Jargowsky 1988 Urban Poverty Areas: Basic Questions Concerning Prevalence, Growth and Dynamics. Center for Health and Human Resources Policy Discussion Paper Series, John F
From page 269...
... New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation 1980 Summary and Finding; of the Natuanal Supported Work Demonstration Cambndge, Mass.: Ballinger.
From page 270...
... An Urban Institute Research Report. December.


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