Local Focus, National Issues
IPR co-sponsors third Chicago Research and Public Policy
Conference
Fall 2004, Volume 26, Number 2
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Dan A. Lewis discusses trends in Chicago poverty |
More than 500 policymakers, researchers, community activists, and local leaders gathered on May 12-13 for the third Conference on Chicago Research and Public Policy. As part of the Urban Universities Collaborative, IPR was one of the event’s sponsors.
“The event is a unique opportunity for stakeholders in the Chicago area to discuss new research, explore policy implications, strengthen local networks, and forge new partnerships,” said Larry Joseph, senior researcher at the Chapin Hall Center for Children, University of Chicago, and the conference’s principal organizer.
In the keynote presentation, Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, painted a broad picture of the challenges facing Chicago and its suburbs. He explained how factors such as increased immigration, greater dispersion in workforce locations, and increased poverty in the suburbs are making it difficult for poor residents to connect with job opportunities. They are also increasing disparities between different racial and ethnic groups.
Hosted by the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago,
the events mirrored the broad spectrum of local issues that Katz mentioned—from
population and housing trends to income and poverty, race and ethnicity,
communities and community development, and children and families. Several
IPR faculty members, researchers, and graduate students presented some
of their latest research findings in panels addressing these and other
issues.
Poverty
Dan A. Lewis,
IPR faculty fellow and professor of education and social policy, presented
one of the lead papers commissioned for the conference, “Poverty
in Chicago: An Analysis of Recent Trends,” co-written with IPR graduate
student Vandna Sinha. In it, the two tracked residential and income mobility
for low-income families.
In Chicago, a city with historically high levels of concentrated poverty, two-thirds of the city’s African Americans live at or below 34 percent of the federal poverty level, with about half moving out of public housing. The researchers found that for those in their sample who moved, their overall welfare did improve, albeit marginally. The level of concentrated poverty fell between 1990 and 2000, yet the rate of racial segregation stayed the same. Movers experienced incremental income increases from 1999 to 2002, but there was no growth for those earning around $15,000, and decreases for those earning more than that.
“The ‘Black Metropolis’ is alive, bringing the poorest people into moderately better situations—it’s hard for anyone to do worse than Robert Taylor Homes, for example,” Lewis said. “But these residents only improve up to a point and then their conditions stall. They do not find themselves in workingclass neighborhoods or making significant strides toward earning decent living wages.”
Public
Housing
Another IPR faculty fellow, sociologist Mary
Pattillo, also addressed public housing issues in “The
Politics of Promises in the Transformation of Chicago Public Housing.”
In retracing the revitalization of a predominantly black neighborhood,
the North Kenwood Oakland (NKO) area of Chicago, Pattillo depicted the
tensions arising between city officials, developers, and public housing
residents. Six 16-story public housing sites were slated for renovation
in 1985, but those plans were later abandoned in favor of rehabbing two
and demolishing four of the buildings.
The negotiations over how many units to rebuild in the neighborhood created a local maelstrom in which NKO residents grappled with the twin pressures of public housing transformation and the revitalization and construction of market-rate housing.
Another session, “Public Housing and Residential Mobility,” highlighted current IPR public housing research: a follow-up of outcomes of original Gautreaux participants, Gautreaux II take-up, and residential mobility programs and mental health problems. The presenters were Jennifer Pashup, IPR project coordinator, and Ruby Mendenhall and Emily Snell, IPR graduate research fellows.
Crime
In his presentation, IPR faculty fellow and policing specialist Wesley
G. Skogan zeroed in on the new immigrants to Chicago, Latinos.
In his decade-long study of Chicago’s
Community Alternative Policing Strategy or CAPS, Skogan and his team
found that their situation has worsened in comparison with the city’s
whites and African Americans.
He reported that two-thirds of all Latinos now cluster in majority Latino areas and levels of English proficiency are falling due to immigration, making communication with police more difficult. Spanish-speaking Latinos are much more likely than other Chicago residents to believe that police are corrupt and use excessive force.
Education
IPR Faculty Fellow James
Rosenbaum, professor of human development and social policy,
spoke about his current study of how faculty at private and public two-year
colleges connect with employers to increase job opportunities for their
students. The study suggests that community colleges can help students
by boosting students’ confidence levels, academic efforts, and educational
persistence. In fact, the study indicates that these college-teacher-employment
linkages are strongly effective in motivating students.
Welfare
Reform
Laura Amsden presented the latest findings of the Illinois
Families Study (IFS), a six-year longitudinal panel study of Illinois
welfare recipients. While caseloads have dropped, there has not been a
corresponding rise in those employed, and the most vulnerable families
are not faring well. She is IFS’s project coordinator.
Lead conference papers can be downloaded at http://www.about.chapinhall.org/uuc/proceedings.html.