chronicle | Jacqueline lived in one of the most toxic environments in urban America. If you’ve seen The Wire, HBO’s series about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you can picture daily life in her neighborhood on that city’s West Side. Drug dealers. Junkies. Shootings. Her high-rise housing project felt like a concrete cell. Jacqueline, a single mother with a sick child, was desperate to escape.
Then
she got a ticket out. In the mid-1990s, Jacqueline volunteered to
participate in a far-reaching social experiment that would shed new
light on urban poverty. The federal government gave her and many others
housing vouchers to move out of ghettos—with a condition. Jacqueline (a
pseudonym used by researchers to protect her privacy) had to use the
voucher in an area where at least 90 percent of the residents lived
above the federal poverty line.
It’s
unlikely that Jacqueline had heard of William Julius Wilson, but the
experiment that would change her life traces its intellectual roots in
part to the Harvard sociologist’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged.
Wilson upended urban research with his ideas about how cities had
transformed in the post-civil-rights period. Writing to explain the rise
of concentrated poverty in black inner-city neighborhoods after 1970,
he focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of black
working- and middle-class families, which left ghettos with a greater
proportion of poor people. And he examined the effects of extreme
poverty and “social isolation” on their lives. The program that
transplanted Jacqueline, Moving to Opportunity, was framed as a test of
his arguments about “whether neighborhoods matter” in poor people’s
lives.
Twenty-five years after its publication, The Truly Disadvantaged is back in the spotlight, thanks to a flurry of high-profile publications and events that address its ideas.
Researchers
who have followed families like Jacqueline’s over 15 years are now
reporting the long-term results of the mobility experiment. The mixed
picture emerging from the project—"one of the nation’s largest attempts
to eradicate concentrated poverty,” in the words of the Harvard
sociologist Robert J. Sampson—is feeding a broader discussion about how
to help the urban underclass.
Families
that moved to safer and better-off areas “improved their health in ways
that were quite profound,” including reductions in obesity and
diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal
investigator of the project’s long-run study. They showed less
depression, Katz says, and “very large increases in happiness.” Yet the
program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and
employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.
At
the same time, two sociologists influenced by Wilson are publishing
important new books that mine extensive data to demonstrate the lasting
impact of place on people’s lives. The first, published in February by
the University of Chicago Press, is Sampson’s Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.
Among his many findings, Sampson shows that exposure to severely
disadvantaged areas hampers children’s verbal skills, an effect that
persists even if they move to better-off places. That handicap is
“roughly equivalent to missing a year of schooling,” according to
research he conducted with Stephen Raudenbush and Patrick Sharkey.
The second book, Sharkey’s Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality,
forthcoming in January from Chicago, explores how neighborhood
inequality spans generations. Sharkey, an associate professor of
sociology at New York University, writes that “over 70 percent of
African-Americans who live in today’s poorest, most racially segregated
neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in the ghettos of
the 1970s.” In other words, “the American ghetto appears to be
inherited"—a finding with implications for policy.
But
as scholars break new ground, is anybody listening? Not since the early
1960s has poverty received so little attention, says Christopher
Jencks, a Harvard professor of public policy. Among sociologists, he
says, optimism that they will make a political impact has waned.
