Poverty, Race, and Inequality Program

Introduction

In the program on Race, Poverty, and Inequality, directed by education and social policy professor James Rosenbaum, IPR researchers look at various causes of poverty, racism, and inequality and their consequences, which include continuation of an influential research line on the effects of public housing and residential policies on child and adult outcomes. Their examinations often overlap with other IPR research programs, in particular Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies. Faculty in this area focus on:

Overview of Activities

MacArthur Plans Housing, Families Network
Supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, social psychologist Thomas D. Cook has put together an interdisciplinary team comprising some of the nation’s leading researchers in housing, poverty, and child development, including IPR sociologist and African American studies professor Mary Pattillo. They will spend 18 months designing a major longitudinal study on housing and families. If successful, the group will evolve into a new MacArthur research network to carry out the study.

According to Cook, past housing policy has relied on a patchwork of studies where success was often measured by the number of bricks laid, the amount of mortar poured, or the number of apartments built. Past studies of housing effects have been mainly one-dimensional—for example, assessing children in a sole area like cognitive performance or mental or physical health. The proposed study will take a broader, multidimensional perspective of how housing and the surrounding social, institutional, and family environment can affect children’s health, education, behavior, and life outcomes. The group has conducted focus groups with low-income Chicago residents to collect information on how they choose and evaluate their neighborhoods and think about housing options when they move. Cook is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics and Justice.

Rethinking Mixed-Income Policies for Poor Black Neighborhoods
Are racially and economically mixed redevelopments an answer to revitalizing poor black neighborhoods? Pattillo critiques this mixed-income approach by pointing out several weaknesses. Relying on her research in the North Kenwood/Oakland area of Chicago, a predominantly black, gentrifying neighborhood on the city’s southern lakefront, she describes how such policies are designed to attract taxpaying, middle-class residents, who are seen as drivers of community growth and rejuvenation. Yet Pattillo’s concern is how such mixed-income policies can irrevocably alter the social capital of current low-income black residents, eventually leading to their marginalization—and in many cases—displacement. Her chapter appears in Public Housing Transformation: Confronting the Legacy of Segregation (Urban Institute Press, 2008).

Race, Class, and Neighborhoods
In a related study of North Kenwood/Oakland, Pattillo explores how whites have operated institutionally using “conservation techniques,” such as racially restrictive covenants, to exclude low-income blacks and to hoard and guard resources in specific residential locations. She traces how these techniques have become embedded in policy decisions and elite actions at federal and city levels, thereby perpetuating class and race inequalities.

Her study demonstrates how race and class are inextricably linked, necessitating that they be studied in relation to one another instead of separately. Pattillo also shows how the black middle class has adopted some of the same opportunity-hoarding techniques to exclude undesirable groups within the black community. The chapter was published in Social Class: How Does It Work? (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2008).

Public Housing and High-Poverty Areas
Sociologist Lincoln Quillian is examining the role of public housing in forming high-poverty areas in U.S. cities. Past analyses have focused on single cities and have failed to account for where residents would live if not in public housing. Quillian uses a series of simple demographic simulations that reallocate the residents of public housing to other residential locations to estimate the effect of public housing projects on spatially concentrated poverty. Overall, poverty concentration is not strongly influenced by public housing because public housing is a small percentage of all housing. However, public housing does have a moderately strong impact on creating areas with exceptionally high levels of concentrated poverty. Quillian finds that larger reductions in poverty concentration would require reducing class and race segregation in private housing markets.

Fair Housing Act: 40 Years Later
Testimony by education and social policy professor James Rosenbaum on housing choice and access to opportunities was included in a report produced by the bipartisan National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, chaired by two former secretaries of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros and Jack Kemp. The report was commissioned on the 40th anniversary of passage of the Fair Housing Act, or Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibits discrimination in public and private housing markets based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status. Released in December 2008, the report finds housing discrimination and segregation are widespread in American cities and towns four decades later. It calls for several measures, including creation of an independent agency to enforce fair housing, revival of the President’s Fair Housing Council, and ensuring that the government takes a proactive approach to advance fair housing principles.

Residential Mobility and Improved Outcomes
Rosenbaum and Stefanie DeLuca of Johns Hopkins University looked at findings from two housing mobility programs: Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity (MTO), which have generated somewhat conflicting conclusions for child and adult outcomes. Gautreaux found more positive outcomes for those who moved into more advantaged neighborhoods while the randomized MTO experiment outcomes were more mixed.
The two researchers find large differences between the kinds of moves created by the two programs. They speculate that bigger moves by Gautreaux families, 25 miles on average versus 10 for the MTO families, might account for some of the discordance in the findings between the two studies, especially since the MTO families did not radically change their social environment (i.e., most children in the MTO study continued to attend the same school or an equally bad school). While it is hoped that more information can be gleaned on housing mobility and improved outcomes from a new study in Baltimore, the Gautreaux study finds that the vast majority of low-income black families remain in suburbs 15 years after placement, suggesting they made permanent escapes from low-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods, which may have contributed to the significant gains in education, employment, and racially integrated friendships, particularly for children.

Mixed-Income Housing Group
Several IPR faculty—Quillian, Pattillo, and economist Greg Duncan—have been part of a diverse, interdisciplinary group of nationally recognized scholars charged with identifying research needs and potential strategies to deepen knowledge about the costs and benefits of building mixed-income housing developments in American cities. This strategy has been the major thrust of housing policy in the United States since the mid-1990s. The group met several times over 2008, including for visits of mixed-income housing developments in Chicago where they met with developers, community activists, and representatives of tenant organizations. The researchers are reviewing research designs, concrete examples, and other areas of interest, such as mixed-income housing effects on individuals and households, governance and community building, city structure and consequences of mixed-income development, and the demographic forces that sustain or destabilize mixed-income neighborhoods. Their final report will be released in summer 2009. The Mixed-Income Research Design Group is organized by the Social Science Research Council with funding from the MacArthur Foundation.

Residential Segregation and Inequality in Educational Attainment
Quillian is studying how residential segregation relates to education inequalities between adolescents from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Using three data sets drawn from census microdata, he contrasts educational outcomes among adolescents raised in metropolitan areas with varying levels of segregation, considering their poverty status and race separately. He finds that young adults from poor families were more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to attend college if they lived in more income-segregated metropolitan areas. Adults raised in more affluent families, on the other hand, were neither more likely to graduate from high school nor go to college in more income-segregated metropolitan areas; they did not gain educationally from segregation. For black-white segregation and Hispanic-white segregation, this result holds for some data and outcomes but not all. Overall, the results suggest that policies to reduce residential desegregation can improve the educational attainment of disadvantaged groups without worsening that of advantaged groups.

Segregation, School Vouchers, and Neoliberals
Historian Nancy MacLean is working on a book manuscript titled, “ ‘Marketplace Solutions’: Segregationists and the Surprising Career of School Vouchers.” The story begins with the closure of the public schools in Prince Edward County, Va., from 1959–64, an outgrowth of segregationists’ policy of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education, that included the first modern tuition grants (i.e., school vouchers). Scholars of civil rights have depicted the school closures as the twilight of massive resistance, yet a fresh look reveals it was also the dawn of the era of privatization, often described as neoliberalism. The research follows the Southerners’ discovery of allies in the nascent national conservative movement, their alliance building with proponents of libertarian economics (above all, the founders of public-choice economics), and their contributions to the “original intent” constitutionalism that later flowed into the Federalist Society and related efforts. The book will also chart their involvement with new institutional partners, such as conservative think tanks and the Republican Party, and examine their efforts to cultivate ties between evangelical Protestants and Catholics for voucher advocacy. The core issues involve how privatization is chipping away at social citizenship—and ultimately, democratic governance.

Linking Financial Intermediation and Policies
Sergio Urzúa and Robert Townsend of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are analyzing the impact of financial intermediation on occupational choices and income. The two economists are studying a variety of structural-choice models to see if financial intermediation has an impact on productivity by easing credit constraints in occupational choice and/or an improved allocation of risk. They then interweave the analysis of these models with econometric information from natural experiments to assess how varying policies and financial institutions affect incomes, occupations, risk sharing, and other variables. In bringing these two strands together, the researchers show how individuals respond to different financial arrangements, providing a natural framework for the analysis and design of different public policies.

Nature and Nurture in Explaining Inequality
Urzúa and Julio Guzman of the University of Chicago are developing a structural model of income inequality that considers how parents’ human capital and an individual’s abilities directly and indirectly affect schooling decisions and labor-market outcomes. Using data from Chile, they analyze how an individual’s inherited characteristics (circumstances) and endogenous decisions (opportunities) might explain income inequality. Preliminary results indicate that both family background and individual abilities play an important role in explaining income inequality. Additionally, inadequate levels of education appear as an important force in explaining the country’s high levels of inequality.

Impact of Early Life on Later Life Outcomes
To trace the effects of early life circumstances on later life outcomes in the United States, Joseph Ferrie, an economist, and his colleagues have assembled a remarkable data set linking information from several separate sources for 2.5 million Americans from birth to death (starting in 1895 through November 2008). The combined records include detailed household and neighborhood information often missing from large longitudinal, epidemiological data sets, including information on economic privation, social isolation, birth order, parental income and socioeconomic status, and proximity to environmental hazards. The researchers hope to provide more accurate projections of the longevity and late-life health of older Americans and better cost-benefit calculations for public health initiatives.

Biases in Risk Perception
With Devah Pager of Princeton University, Quillian continues to study social factors that influence people’s perceptions about their chances of experiencing a hazardous event. Their most recent work focuses on race and biases in perceptions of the risk of criminal victimization. Quillian and Pager examine how perceptions of the risk of becoming a victim of a burglary or robbery compare with actual victimization rates. By layering data from the Survey of Economic Expectations and census zip code information from 1994 to 2000, they find more people believe they will become crime victims than is borne by victimization rates. Their results also show that neighborhood racial composition is strongly associated with perceived risk of victimization among white respondents, although neighborhood socioeconomic status drives the risk of actual victimization.

Racial Gaps in Poverty Rates
With Rozlyn Redd of Columbia University, Quillian has completed a review and analysis of studies of the role of social capital in maintaining persistent racial gaps in poverty rates in the United States. Supplementing their review with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), they focus on four prominent social capital explanations relevant to poverty disparities: job search networks, neighborhood collective efficacy, ethnicity in social networks, and networks of school friends. They find the latter three have a significant effect on racial gaps in poverty but can explain only a small share of racial differences in poverty rates. They conclude that the term “social capital” has become a catchphrase for myriad ways in which social interactions matter, and evidence for social capital explanations is often weak due to a failure to account for selection of social context. They do, however, find compelling evidence for linking racial inequality and certain types of social capital deficiencies to impoverished neighborhoods.

Gender, Sexuality, and HIV/AIDS
Law professor Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor, continues her work on gender, sexuality, and implications for HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. She co-edited the volume Sex, Power, and Taboo: HIV and Gender in the Caribbean and Beyond (Ian Randle Press, 2008), which draws upon research from a number of disciplines to offer a provocative look at why today poor black women are overrepresented globally in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Responding to the AIDS crisis in the Caribbean, the book explores the relationship between gender and sexuality in the region and elsewhere to illuminate the impact of gender on HIV risk and prevention. Roberts began her work on the book when she was on a Fulbright fellowship in the Caribbean region at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Watkins-Hayes has also contributed a chapter on the social and economic context of black women living with HIV/AIDS in the United States. Rhoda Reddock and Sandra Reid of the University of the West Indies and Dianne Douglas of Yale Medical School are co-editors.

Framing Institutions and HIV/AIDS
While black women represented 37 percent of Chicago’s female population in 2005, they accounted for 80 percent of female HIV infections—a rate of 43 per 100,000 or more than 15 times that of white females in the city. How do these women move from behaving as though they have a death sentence to living with HIV as a chronic but manageable disease? Sociologist and African American studies assistant professor Celeste Watkins-Hayes and her colleagues find that the infected women cope in various ways, ranging from productively managing the disease to outright denial and engaging in risky behavior. How they cope is dependent on the “framing institutions” that they come into contact with, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers, churches, HIV residential centers, social programs, and medical institutions. These organizations are critical in shaping the women’s beliefs and behaviors. For example, one woman spoke about how she was able to move away from feelings of shame and hopelessness because of her doctor’s attitude and advice when he informed her that she was HIV-positive. Another woman spoke about how she has kept her infection a secret from her family and fellow inmates because of the climate of shame and the potential for isolation that permeates the prison where she is incarcerated. The study receives funding from the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies’ Collaborative HIV-Prevention Research in Minority Communities Program at the University of California, San Francisco.