Saving Middle-Class Kids at the Expense of the Poor

Ok, this blog post is going to be totally contrarian, so I want to say up front that I like the research findings on which it's based, especially from a racial equity perspective, and am curious to see how/if public-private investment follows from it.  But I just have to pick at something; stay w/me here...

A report from the Pew Charitable Trusts came out last week that shows that the #1 reason about half of middle-class African-American kids experience downward mobility as adults (i.e., they are poorer when they grow up) is because they grow up in high poverty neighborhoods.  Lots of research has shown that middle-class and low-income Blacks often live in the same or proximate neighborhoods to one another.  "Half of black children born between 1955 and 1970 in families with incomes of $62,000 or higher in today's dollars grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods."  And the data is not much different today.

The report authors (disclosure: I used to blog with Pat Sharkey at the now defunct Foresight) have this to say:

Sharkey and Morton said policymakers can take heart in one finding: Black children in neighborhoods in which poverty fell by 10 percent had higher incomes as adults than those who grew up in areas where the poverty rate stayed the same. This is a sign, they said, that simply improving the overall economy and quality of a given neighborhood can have beneficial effects on those growing up in it.

But the report also concludes that the data shows that we need more cradle-to-crave, neighborhood based investments, a la Harlem Children's Zone, a strategy that "holds more promise than dispersing poor families into middle-class neighborhoods by giving them housing vouchers, a strategy that has had mixed results and could be difficult to implement on a large scale."

But, doesn't dispersal of low-income Americans, by vouchers and HOPE VI, for instance, make their prior neighborhoods better off for the middle-class kids living there?  So doesn't this report suggest that we should sacrifice the poor on behalf of the middle-class?

At a minimum, it points to the need to face the persistence of poverty in the U.S., and its drag on us all.

(Marching band practice in Detroit; photo by Karpov the Wrecked Train)