> From: Nathan Newman <newman@garnet.berkeley.edu>
> Subject:      CROSSROADS: Poverty Epidemic (fwd)
> To: Multiple recipients of list LEFTNEWS <LEFTNEWS@CMSA.BERKELEY.EDU>
> 
> /* Written  4:54 PM  Aug 22, 1995 by crossroads in igc:crossroads */
> /* ---------- "Poverty Epidemic" ---------- */
> The following article appeared in the April issue of
> CrossRoads magazine, which had a focus on lessons from the
> U.S. Anti-Apartheid movement. For more information about
> subscribing to CrossRoads, email crossroad-info@igc.apc.org
> 
> The Poverty
> Epidemic
> 
> Marie Kennedy details the growth of poverty in the U.S. and
> critiques the ways the poor are demonized and discounted.
> 
>      As the right wing rhetoric of Newt Gingrich and company
> increasingly dehumanizes and demonizes the poor in the U.S.,
> the reality of poor people's lives and the voices of poor
> people themselves figure less and less in the public debate.
> Adding to the tendency for the middle class (and even some
> of the poor themselves) to see large sections of the poor as
> "them" and not "us" are public policies which concentrate on
> keeping the poor out of sight and silent.
>      To understand the success of these policies it is
> useful to tackle several crucial questions. Who is poor in
> the U.S.? Is U.S. poverty increasing or decreasing? What
> about inequality? Are some groups more likely than others to
> be poor? What conditions do the poor in the U.S. share with
> the poor of developing countries? After addressing these
> questions we can better understand how the poor get
> marginalized in policy debates and develop more fruitful
> directions for work aimed at fighting poverty. For
> statistically describing who is poor this article uses U.S.
> census figures from 1992 and the official poverty line as
> defined by the U.S. government. Most who work with the poor
> feel this line seriously undercounts the poor, but it is the
> most easily available data.
> INCREASING AND UNEVEN POVERTY
>      Although it is well known that there was a lot of job
> growth in the U.S. during the 1980s, there was another trend
> that is not as well known: the growth of poverty. Throughout
> the 1960s, the proportion of persons in poverty more or less
> steadily declined, bottoming out in 1973, at which point it
> began to increase again. In 1960, 22 percent of all persons
> were below the poverty level; in 1973, only 11 percent were;
> but by 1992, this figure had risen to 15 percent. In terms
> of absolute numbers, there were nearly 37 million people in
> poverty in the U.S. in 1992, slightly more than in 1960.
>      Certain groups are more likely to be poor than others -
> - children, single female-headed families, Blacks and
> Hispanics (the census term). In 1992, the poverty rate for
> all children under 18 was 22 percent. Children account for
> 40 percent of the poor, although they are only about 25
> percent of the population. A recent study showed that five
> million children under the age of 12 in the U.S. -- one of
> every eight children in the country -- suffer from
> substantial food shortages. Another six million are close to
> the margin -- either hungry or risking hunger.
>      In 1992, 39 percent of single female-headed families
> were in poverty. One-sixth of all households are headed by
> women, but they accounted for more than half of poor
> families in 1992.
>      For Blacks, the story is much worse. A third of all
> Black persons and more than half of single female-headed
> Black families were in poverty in 1992. Hispanics fare only
> slightly better than Blacks; 29 percent of Hispanic persons
> and 51 percent of single female-headed Hispanic families
> were in poverty in 1992.
> INCREASING INEQUALITY
>      Not only is poverty increasing, so is inequality.  In
> 1973, the fifth of the households making the least income
> received 4.2 percent of all income; in 1992, this had fallen
> to only 3.8 percent. In the same period, the fifth of
> households making the highest income claimed 41 percent of
> all income in 1973 and this had risen to 45 percent in 1992.
> The 5 percent of households earning the most income claimed
> 17 percent in 1973 and 19 percent in 1992.
>      Not only are certain groups particularly hard hit by
> poverty, but poverty is often spatially concentrated as
> well. If you reside in the central city, you are much more
> likely to be poor than if you reside elsewhere. While 15
> percent of all persons were in poverty in 1992, 21 percent
> of persons in central cities were in poverty and 42 percent
> of all poor people reside in the central city. So, you don't
> just have poor people, you have poor neighborhoods. And the
> poorest urban neighborhoods are almost all Black or Latino -
> - in fact, Blacks and Latinos are five times as likely as
> whites to live in inner-city poverty.
>      If you look at poor neighborhoods, many of the
> characteristics are very much like a poor country. Urbanists
> and economists began to draw out this analogy in the 1970s,
> particularly in reference to Black ghettos. Although poor
> urban neighborhoods in the U.S. have become more multi-
> ethnic in the past 20 years, the comparison still holds.
> William Goldsmith, a professor at Cornell University,
> writing in 1974, constructed an analogy between the Black
> ghetto and typical Third World former colonies, describing
> former colonies in the following way: (1) poverty of
> material goods; (2) high population growth rates; (3) a few
> wealthy and many poor people; (4) a small basic industrial
> sector; (5) low labor productivity, low savings, and little
> investment; (6) dependence on an export whose supply is not
> fully utilized no matter how low the price; (7) dependence
> on imports for consumption, often encouraged by advertising
> from the exterior; and finally, (8) outside ownership of
> much of the local economy. In addition, the neocolonialist
> citizens are restrained from movement to other places by
> citizenship, language, and skills, as well as race,
> religion, and social affinity.
>      Goldsmith goes on to draw out the analogy to the
> ghetto, one by one: (1) ghetto residents are poor; (2) they
> have high birth rates; (3) their incomes are highly skewed,
> a few high and many low; (4) there is almost no basic
> industry in the ghetto; (5) labor productivity is low, and
> savings and investment are low, too; (6) the major ghetto
> export is labor, which is tremendously underemployed, even
> at low wages; (7) almost all ghetto consumption is supplied
> from the outside, most of it conforming to outside
> (advertised) consumption standards; and finally, (8)
> practically the entire ghetto economy is owned externally.
> Like the former colonials, and partly as a result of many of
> these conditions, people usually are unable to leave the
> ghetto.
>      Since the time when Goldsmith wrote, another similarity
> between poor neighborhoods and poor countries has emerged --
> both U.S. cities and debtor countries have lost control over
> their fiscal policy.
>      In the mid-'70s, U.S. cities experienced a series of
> fiscal crises which caused lenders to refuse to continue
> lending to cities unless they adopted austerity programs.
> Many of the resultant U.S. urban policies look a lot like
> the structural adjustment policies pushed by the U.S. Agency
> for International Development, the IMF and the World Bank,
> and the effects on poor people in both situations have been
> disastrous. Human and community services previously rendered
> at the local level have been slashed and there is a push to
> privatize remaining services -- for example, public housing
> is being sold off and city services -- from health services
> to education and garbage collection -- are being privatized.
> DISINVESTMENT AND DISPLACEMENT
>      A brief glance at two further concepts -- uneven
> development and the distinction between neighborhood and
> community -- rounds out this painful picture.
>      Poor people throughout the world have been relegated to
> live on land that is considered undesirable for other uses.
> However, previously undesirable land may become desirable as
> the needs of capital change. Capital flows to those places
> where conditions are more favorable for accumulation.
> Capitalist development and underdevelopment are two sides of
> the same coin.
>      To assess the destruction that involuntary displacement
> wreaks in the lives of poor urbanites, it is useful to draw
> a distinction between the terms neighborhood and community.
> A neighborhood, having a particular location, is made up of
> buildings and other supporting structures, and occupies a
> piece of land. It is also a community, which means that it
> has a social and political as well as physical reality.
>      In the U.S. capitalist economy, a neighborhood is a
> collection of commodities. Its land and buildings are bought
> and sold on the market for profit. As a commodity, a
> neighborhood goes through cycles in which it is developed,
> decays, and is rebuilt, cycles that occur in the context of
> cycles of accumulation for the city and the economy as a
> whole.
>      But a neighborhood is also a place where people live,
> organize themselves, study, reproduce themselves, their
> culture and ideas, sometimes work, and generally make
> themselves into a community. The needs of people in
> communities and the needs of capital do not always coincide,
> and when they do not, a struggle ensues. From the point of
> view of capital, a community has a social function, mainly
> to reproduce labor power and social relations. Black and
> Latino communities in particular are subject to pressures
> that maintain significant parts of these communities as
> cheap labor in more or less permanent under- and
> unemployment.
>      On the one hand, it is desirable for capital that these
> communities function smoothly without upsetting the
> established order of things, and certainly without
> disrupting the basic labor market. On the other hand, such a
> stable community tends to generate consciousness of its own
> oppressed condition, a sense of collective self, networks of
> social support, creative ideas, solidarity and political
> power, all of which may contradict the needs of capital to
> maintain the neighborhood as a pliable "free" commodity for
> the market. This is the contradiction around which most
> urban land control struggles in the U.S. focus. The stakes
> are highest for poor people.
>      When people are pushed from one neighborhood to another
> they lose their community and with it much of their informal
> support system which otherwise augments a meager income, and
> they lose much of their ability to join together to advocate
> for themselves as a group in the face of an increasingly
> removed bureaucratic human delivery system.
>      A growing segment of the urban poor do not officially
> live in particular neighborhoods -- the homeless. In the
> 1960s and '70s, poor people who were displaced could usually
> find some sort of alternative housing, often in public or
> government-subsidized projects. But, during the last two
> decades, both disinvestment and gentrification cut into the
> existing housing stock in low- and moderate-income
> neighborhoods and government cut back on its commitment to
> build new affordable housing. Whole neighborhoods like the
> South Bronx in New York were "triaged" as a deliberate
> public policy; that is, essential city services and
> infrastructure maintenance were withdrawn, banks and
> landlords in turn walked away, buildings were abandoned and
> neighborhoods vacated. At the same time fast-growing urban-
> based service industries attracted professionals back to the
> city, fueling gentrification and turning neighborhoods
> upscale and unaffordable for most residents. Throughout the
> Reagan and Bush administrations, government subsidies for
> housing rapidly dried up. In this conservative atmosphere,
> sympathy for other regulatory measures, such as rent
> control, also waned. Housing costs in most cities
> skyrocketed as did the shortage of housing units.
>      Consequently, throughout the 1980s and '90s, the ranks
> of the homeless have been growing in every major city.
> Estimates of the number of homeless range from the federal
> government's conservative figure of 300,000 to the National
> Union of the Homeless' figure of three million.
> TO BE DISCOUNTED
>      The response to increasing poverty on the part of many
> public and private service providers and policy analysts has
> been to normalize situations which only a few years ago were
> viewed by most North Americans as intolerable. One example
> is the growing shelter industry to service the homeless.
> What was initially an emergency short-term response has
> become an institutionalized, multi-million dollar a year
> business which provides jobs to countless middle class
> workers. For example, in 1987, one state alone,
> Massachusetts, spent over $200 million for the homeless,
> approaching $1,000 a bed a month, and this cost has been
> steeply rising every since. Shelter policies are
> increasingly custodial and geared to keeping the homeless
> out of sight, rather than empowering people to take care of
> themselves. As Kip Tiernan, founder of the first homeless
> shelter for women in Boston, put it: "Providing shelter is
> becoming an alternative to providing a decent standard of
> living for people and the shelter industry has become a
> self-perpetuating industry."
>      Another example of how policy analysts are "writing
> off" the poor is the invention and use in poverty studies
> and programs of the term "underclass." In the words of Chris
> Tilly and Abel Valenzuela, writing in Dollars & Sense:
>      "`Underclass'...has become a stigmatizing and negative
> label that blames increased inner-city poverty on the
> ingrained behavior of the poor themselves. Implicit in the
> term is the notion of a class of people `under' the rest of
> us, living a life much different from us, even different
> from that of most poor people...
>      "The most controversial definition refers to underclass
> members as having `persistent pathological behaviors'... The
> new focus on the underclass by researchers suggests that the
> poverty problem is an underclass problem, and that poverty
> policy is best directed towards correcting the poor's
> pathological behaviors. Policy-makers who view the
> underclass as a behavioral phenomenon most often promote
> punitive programs aimed at discouraging these behaviors,
> such as ...stringent welfare work requirements. This
> distracts attention away from larger social conditions, for
> example, the need for jobs and affordable housing -- the
> more crucial elements of a program to fight urban poverty."
> NEEDED: A STRONGER VOICE
>      Solving the problem of poverty is difficult, but a
> first step is making poverty and the poor more, not less,
> visible. Too many approaches to solving poverty suggest that
> the poor are themselves the problem; hence the tendency to
> keep them out of sight and separated from "regular" people
> as much as possible, whether in homeless shelters, in
> segregated neighborhoods, in understated statistics or in
> dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric. The poor are not the
> problem; rather poor people have a problem.
>      Materially poor communities also have resources that
> need to be tapped. The main resource is the creative energy
> of economically poor people themselves, especially when that
> energy is focused towards community development and not just
> individual development (as is the focus of most so-called
> anti-poverty programs). So, a critical step toward solving
> poverty is to adopt community development strategies which
> rely on the poor themselves as the major agents of change.
> As Tanzania's Julius Nyrere put it in the 1960s, "a
> community cannot be developed, it can only develop itself.
> For real development means the development, the growth, of
> people." More recently, Kari Levitt, an economist working in
> the Caribbean, expanded on that theme:
>      "Development cannot be imposed from without. It is a
> creative social process and its central nervous system, the
> matrix which nourishes it, is located in the cultural
> sphere. Development is ultimately not a matter of money or
> physical capital, or foreign exchange, but of the capacity
> of a society to tap the root of popular creativity, to free
> up and empower people to exercise their intelligence and
> collective wisdom."
>      People who genuinely want to work to eliminate poverty
> must develop their ability to work with low-income
> communities in a way that empowers people in the development
> process. African American scholar Manning Marable provides a
> concise definition of empowerment, and one that is
> particularly apt for community activists:
>      "Empowerment is essentially a capacity to define
> clearly ones' interests, and to develop a strategy to
> achieve those interests. It's the ability to create a plan
> or program to change one's reality in order to obtain those
> objectives or interests. Power is not a `thing' it's a
> process. In other words, you shouldn't say that a group has
> power, but that, through its conscious activity, a group can
> empower itself by increasing its ability to achieve its own
> interests."
>      Thus, real community development requires not only a
> redistribution of resources from the wealthy to the poor,
> but also a redistribution of control over those resources
> from the powerful to the poor. Until policy-makers and
> community development workers recognize this truth, poverty
> and underdeveloped communities will continue to increase."
> 
> 
> Resources: William Goldsmith, "The Ghetto as a Resource for
> Black America," in the Journal of the American Institute of
> Planners, January 1994; William Goldsmith and Edward
> Blakeley, Separate Societies: Poverty and Inequality in U.S.
> Cities, Temple University Press, 1992; Kari Levitt, "Debt,
> Adjustment and Development: Looking to the 1990s,"
> Association of Caribbean Economists; Manning Marable, The
> Crisis of Color and Democracy, Common Courage Press, 1992;
> Chris Tilly and Abel Valenzuela, "Down and Out In the City,"
> in Dollars & Sense, April 1990; U.S. Census Bureau, Money
> Income of Households, Families and Persons in the United
> States: 1992 and Poverty in the United States: 1992.
> 
> 
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-- 
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Talmadge Wright                                        (312)508-3451 *
Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology                  FAX:(312)508-3646 *
Loyola University Chicago                   twright@orion.it.luc.edu *
6525 N. Sheridan Rd.                                                 *
Chicago, Illinois 60626                                              *
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