Coming into an election year, this is a highly important snapshot of urban social economics and poverty. Author Alana Semuels lays out the economic changes in Syracuse, NY, on a decades-long timeline that includes my years there in the mid-70s. What she describes is eerily familiar - decaying pocket neighborhoods jammed in between I-81, I-690 and the edges of the towering Syracuse University campus. The Hill, we called it. All were high barriers of both concrete and social disconnection for people living in those neighborhoods.
What's startling to me is how much the growth of urban, concentrated poverty has accelerated since 2000 - producing staggering statistics on top of what was already an emerging crisis in the 70s.
I appreciate that Ms. Semuels offers stories about real families trying to escape poverty and protect their children. However, it is the macro view that gives pause, and commands all of us to vote with our conscience in 2016. Let's consider this:
In 1969, the city’s poverty rank was 72nd in the nation of cities with a population of 100,000 or more, with 14 percent of its residents living in poverty. By 1979, it had snuck up to 44th, with a poverty rate of 18 percent. By 1989, it was tied for 26th with a poverty rate of 23 percent.
And this:
Nationwide, the number of people living in high-poverty areas nearly doubled, reaching 13.8 million in 2013 from 7.2 million in 2000.
Ms. Semuels notes the 1956 Federal Highway Act as a genesis for today's problems. In Syracuse, it was a highway project that destroyed Ward 15, a stable mostly African-American neighborhood, without any coordinated effort to mitigate the deep disruption it created. I do not want to overplay the impacts of urban design. While important, the disruption exposed others issues like disparate economic mobility (white migration) and institutionalized racism in the local job market. It was a perfect storm that continues to this day.
Consider one story in this article. To protect her teenage son, a mother scrapes together all her resources for a big move out of her high-poverty neighborhood. Within months, the economic bottom has fallen out of her new neighborhood. Her son is now facing worsened conditions at home and in school, and she no longer has the resources for another move.
Is this really what we want for our country? We can have all the debates we want about handouts, welfare, food stamps, quotas, charter schools, housing, jails, etc. And in the end, we still have a nation where nearly 15 million people are already living in high poverty areas, with little resources to improve their situation. We are past the time for meaningful political action.
Ward 15 was comparatively healthy in the 1950s, during a time of segregation and high public investment. I do not want a return to separation, and I do not believe we need a 90% tax bracket. But what we have been doing since the late 1970s clearly is not working.
If we as citizens and voters refuse to vote and invest in our country, we metaphorically are sitting back and watching more paint peel away, more mold, more window cracks and more gutters rusting in our collective home. As a nation, there is no migrating away from what we create through fear and inaction. It is our nation, our yard, our home.