More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City

The silence surrounding racial inequality in the 1990s and early 2000s was a marked change from the civil unrest of the 1960s, especially following the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina revealed the squalid living conditions of the poor of New Orleans. Impoverished families were unable to relocate, and the media coverage brought attention for the first time to the inequalities faced by inhabitants of isolated inner-city ghettoes. Explicitly race-based structural forces, political actions, and impersonal economic forces all shape life for blacks in the inner city. National cultural beliefs and racial constraints have emerged from years of racial isolation and chronic economic subordination.

In 1934, the Federal Housing Association (FHA) was established, necessitated by mortgage foreclosures during the Great Depression. Selectively administered housing subsidies excluded majority-black inner-city areas, where potential buyers were denied mortgages. “Redlining,” as it became known, was assessed largely on the basis of racial composition. This set the stage for the present urban blight and was clearly motivated by racial bias. This practice was only discontinued in the 1960s. In the 1950s, suburbanization of the middle class was supported by subsidization loans to groups such as veterans and by routing highways through inner-city neighborhoods.

This routing reinforced unofficial segregation by walling off poor neighborhoods from commercial districts and causing wealthier residents to relocate to the suburbs. The 14-lane Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago is one such legacy, creating a physical barrier between black and white neighborhoods. Another egregious example is Birmingham, Alabama’s interstate highway system, which bends through several black neighborhoods rather than taking a more direct route through some predominantly white neighborhoods; it largely follows the demarcations of racial zoning laws dating to 1926. Other examples are found in Atlanta, Georgia, and along the I-95 in Florida. The suburban dream was furthered by Levitt’s suburban housing developments, which initially refused black people. The first black family moved into a Levittown neighborhood in 1957 and endured harassment, hate mail, and threats.  

Explicit racial policies in suburbs reinforced the social divide by allowing the separation of spending budgets from inner cities. Annexation largely ended in the mid-20th century, with suburbs implementing “zoning laws.” These discriminatory land-use laws made it difficult for racial minorities to access these areas, as they were effectively used to screen on the basis of race. These policies also reflected class bias, leading to increased segregation of low-income blacks in inner-city neighborhoods. The year 1937 saw the Wagner-Steagall public housing program, which was initially successful due to the economic mobility of the initial inhabitants; 1949 marked the second policy stage, which was designed to eliminate inner-city slums and collect the homeless left behind by earlier urban renewal bulldozers.

The income ceiling for this public housing was reduced, concentrating the lowest income sector of the population. This move coincided with the mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities. Suburbanites refused to permit the construction of public housing, so public housing remained concentrated in inner-city ghettoes. The Fair Housing Amendment Act of 1988 reduced these barriers. Migration of blacks ended in the 1970s, when the suburbanization of employment ceased the draw of African American workers to inner-city industrial jobs, and inner-city communities were gradually abandoned by more affluent classes.

Sharp spending cuts in inner cities under President Reagan in the 1980s reduced aid and support services to disadvantaged inhabitants. New York City’s state aid dropped from 52% of its budget in 1980 to 32% in 1989, for example. This change in state aid was another policy that was superficially nonracial but indirectly contributed to the crystallization of the inner-city ghetto. These municipalities struggle to provide basic services, especially under the pressures of drug addiction, AIDS, and homelessness. The latter half of the 1990s saw an improvement in inner cities, but this improvement ended with the recession of 2001.

Combined pressures meant many inner cities lacked the fiscal means to address the problems of joblessness, family breakups, and failing public schools. The Bush administration contributed to the lack of support for inner cities through large tax cuts for wealthy citizens and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Policymakers tolerated industry practices that undermined worker security, such as involuntary part-time employment. The minimum wage had eroded to a level 24% lower than in the 1960s, making a recent increase long overdue. All this impeded the working poor from successfully supporting their families.

Older urban areas that were once centers of economic activity have since been eroded by shifting economic patterns that are typically considered nonracial. Nevertheless, these patterns have exacerbated racial decline and widened gaps between races and incomes. Since the mid-20th century, the economy has shifted from manufacturing to finance, services, and technology. In the last several decades, improvements in productivity drastically reduced the import of physical capital, and manufacturing was relocated to developing nations. Global economic transformations have adversely affected US “rust belt” cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, which all perform poorly in measures of employment growth, a traditional indicator of economic performance. Employment increased by 25% between 1991 and 2001, but in these cities, growth either was either negative or did not exceed 3%. Manufacturing jobs were more stable and protected than non-unionized jobs. Local economies suffer in inner cities, where just one third of overall growth has occurred since 1989. Racism has also impeded African Americans from thriving in the job market, contributing to their ghettoization in areas lacking basic amenities and served by substandard schools.            

Cultural factors are also at play, including the widespread idea that inner-city problems have little to do with racial segregation. Individuals and families are believed to bear the responsibility for their low achievement. One of the effects of living in a racially segregated community is entrenchment of patterns of racial exclusion that impede social mobility. Americans tend to de-structuralize inner-city poverty, focusing instead on individualistic explanations. James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith concluded from a survey that most Americans believe that “economic inequality is fair” (44). In the three times their survey was administered, the most recent of which was in 1990 at the time of publishing, the most commonly selected cause of poverty by the American public was “lack of effort” (44). More than nine out of ten Americans thought that lack of effort was a highly important factor in black underachievement. The European Union, by comparison, focuses much more on structural inequalities. Thus, it falls to the social scientist to provide education about chronic racial and economic subordination.

Concentrated poverty increases the likelihood of isolation and adversely affects one’s chances in life, studies show. Other studies contend that this finding does not account for “self-selection bias”—in this case, due to the attraction of less successful families to lower rents (46). A Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing pilot program, “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO), offered subsidized housing throughout Chicago between 1994 and 1998 in an effort to remedy former segregation. Researchers systematically compared the lives of families in the suburbs and inner city. Suburban families experienced significantly higher rates of employment, lower school dropout rates, and higher college attendance rates. Quigley and Raphael point out that the experiments had not improved employment rates (47). However, the experiments had limited scope because, for instance, many families simply moved from one impoverished black neighborhood to another. In fact, the studies tell us little about long-term effects of neighborhood on poor families, in part due to the crudity of quantitative measures for capturing such effects.

In the national longitudinal survey “Panel Study of Income Dynamics” (PSID), Patrick Sharkey found that consecutive generations of black families live in poor neighborhoods, unlike poor white families, who are more socially mobile (52). Sharkey suggests that to capture the effects of ghettoization, intergenerational studies would be more revelatory than short-term studies. Living in impoverished neighborhoods has a dramatically negative impact on the academic and verbal abilities of children. For example, young African Americans living in disadvantaged neighborhoods fell behind their peers by up to six IQ points, one study showed.

University of Wisconsin sociology professor Erik Olin Wright points out that common psychological experiences—such as blacks’ experience of racism—can be erroneously interpreted as norms (55). Indeed, structural factors are likely to play a more important role than cultural factors in neighborhood dynamics. Two studies conducted by University of Texas professor Paul Jargowsky showed that in 1990, almost a third of African Americans lived in ghettoized neighborhoods (57). In 2000, the figure was 19%. This reduction was due to short-term economic factors and cannot be seen as an overall trend, since unemployment and individual poverty rates have increased since 2000.

In conclusion, a number of structural influences have adversely affected inner-city black neighborhoods. These include both racial and nonracial political actions, as well as impersonal economic forces. Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities, together with suburbanization, led to the gradual abandonment of inner-city black communities. In this chapter, Wilson highlighted two studies on the MTO experiments that provided evidence for the cumulative effects of living in poor, segregated neighborhoods. Effects such as chronic lack of employment opportunities and access to quality schools combine with cultural norms developed through long-term discrimination, such as poor language skills. This body of evidence suggests that cultural forces are secondary to the economic and political forces that move American society.