[US] Many of nation's poor trapped in pockets of concentrated poverty

From Sign On San Diego

By Juliana Barbassa
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO – Many of the country's most disadvantaged minority households are trapped in pockets of concentrated urban poverty, preventing them from getting the educations and jobs that would enable them to rise above the poverty line.
Fresno has the nation's highest concentration of residents in extremely poor neighborhoods, according to a study released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

New Orleans, second on the list, had its deep racial and economic rifts exposed by Hurricane Katrina. But according to the Census-based research, the deprivation seen in that city's lower Ninth Ward is closely mirrored by conditions in parts of Louisville, Ky., Miami, and Atlanta, which round out the report's top five list.

Poor planning over decades has concentrated public housing at the core of cities around the nation, while new developments, jobs and schools mushroomed in the suburbs, beyond the reach of low-income households, deepening the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the study said.

"Concentrating poverty compounds the effects of just plain poverty," said Alan Berube, primary author of "Katrina's Window: Confronting Concentrated Poverty Across America."

Berube's study focused on extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods where high crime and a lack of quality housing, stable job opportunities and supportive schools erode the quality of life, and limit the chances that a family might rise above the hardships imposed by their own financial straits.

These are areas in which 40 percent or more of residents live below the federal poverty line. The average household earnings in these areas barely exceed $20,000, and four in 10 adults are disconnected from the labor force – unemployed and not looking for work.

"We're underserved, under-respected. ... You have to leave your community to get the most basic services," said Rev. Paul Binion II of Fresno's Westside Church of God.

One result of high-density poverty is its tendency to ensnare the next generation, the study suggests. In these communities, where an average of one in 12 adults have college degrees, children lack the money, role models and academic footing that would help them get into college themselves.

"It's access," said Tate Hill, business development coordinator for the Fresno West Coalition for Economic Development. "It's not that people who live in impoverished areas don't want to work or don't want better lives or don't want their children to go to good schools – they just can't access it."

Tate's organization serves an area of 36,000 people that is 49 percent Hispanic, 26 percent black, and 10 percent Asian and doesn't have a single bank or credit union in the area. The nonprofit offers vocational training, first-home-buyer's classes, and coaching in basic workplace skills like interviewing.

But Tate sees the obstacles to a better life growing even as he works to tear them down. As California's still affordable Central Valley attracts new residents from the more affluent urban areas to the north and south, housing prices are skyrocketing, he said, and people are being left behind.

Fresno is working to overcome these challenges, but its efforts are hampered by a limited tax base, city officials said.

"We're very aggressive in our efforts to produce affordable housing," said Michael Sigala, Fresno's housing and community development manager. "There's just not enough resources when the city doesn't have a very rich population to start with."

Within the last year, the city committed funding for 250 new units that will be dispersed throughout the city, and available at reduced rents, Sigala said.

Atlanta is one of the cities where a concerted effort has been made to dissolve pockets of poverty.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development tore down some of the city's worst projects and replaced them with mixed-income neighborhoods in the 1990s.

But the successful program, created under the first Bush administration and supported by President Clinton, has been hurt by the current president's budget cuts, Berube said.

"For a significant number of families in distressed inner-city neighborhoods, the first step has to be removing the barriers associated with their living environment," Berube said.