APN Statewide Poverty Report: History Of Poverty Chapter
David D. Troutt
03 May 2016
This chapter is part of CLiME's collaboration with the New Jersey Anti-Poverty Network's Report on Structural Racism and Poverty
There are as many ways to think about what poverty is as there are to chronicle its historical roots. For many of the 47 million Americans currently living with incomes below the federal poverty line, being poor is working poverty—they manage low-wage, often contingent work, or see their incomes fall temporarily below the official line while struggling through a career transition, a divorce or a serious illness. For every poor person or family, poverty represents a deprivation of key resources that is accompanied by a loss of power over how to reclaim them. For persistently poor families and individuals, however, poverty is steeper, more prolonged, a territorial trap. The lack of resources and sense of disempowerment manifests itself as a chronic lack of opportunity amid virtually every institution with which they interact—labor markets, schools, hospitals, social services, landlords, stores, police. At the extreme end of American poverty, being poor means living in a marginalized status, a walking negation of the American Dream.
While the full spectrum of poverty is important to our understanding of poverty, this chapter will focus on the history that has given rise to the most persistent poverty in New Jersey and across the country. Why? Because most poverty is family poverty, and very high proportions of poor people are children under the age of 18. Because persistent poverty reflects an accumulation ofresource deficits, what’s missing in a child’s life is much harder to make up forlater. Children feel the imprint of powerlessness only indirectly when measured in income. But when measured by opportunity, persistently poor children directly experience poor schools, poor public safety, poor health, poor recreational outlets, poor diets and so forth. And these experiences are formative—that is, they affect cognitive functioning, patterns of wellness, social capital, career readiness and relationships. Therefore, we look at the history of persistent poverty because for every child in its grip it threatens to become their life prospects.
Since World War II, the forces that have contributed to persistent poverty have formed a triangle: industrial restructuring, discrimination and residential status. Being middle class has typically meant working consistently in a good- paying job with benefits, experiencing little or no discrimination and owning a home in a neighborhood with desirable amenities and appreciating home values. Being poor has usually meant that one, two or all three of these legs of a stool—job, access or housing—have collapsed. As the national ranks of America’s poorcontinue to swell, more and more people have struggled to keep one or another leg stable. Their grip on the middle class has weakened, and the traditional pathways to economic mobility have narrowed.
For members of some groups, this reflects a longstanding pattern. Large segments of the African-American and Native American communities remain mired in persistent poverty, resulting from the peculiar interaction of aggressive overt and covert forms of racial discrimination, labor transformations and residential exclusion from housing wealth. In New Jersey, this toxic mix has led to a concentration of African Americans in surprisingly few parts of the state. They are overrepresented in post-industrial central cities, disproportionately renters rather than homeowners, excluded from the job, tax base and household wealth growth of recent suburban economic development corridors. The massive influx of immigrants, principally from Latino America from 1990-2010,made these newcomers 15% of the state’s population in two decades. Many wererecruited by businesses to work in agriculture and manufacturing in the suburbs, so they were spread around the state. The first immigrants became magnets for others so many often by choice went into post-industrial cities to create communities where they could find support and take economic advantage of their growing numbers. The majority, however, entered into the existing mix of poverty and soon faced the same dynamics. Compounding the marginalization, our negative perceptions of the poor engendered a pattern of punitive legal rules—things like school disciplinary policies that criminalize poor children’sdisruptive behavior, zero-tolerance welfare policies and a criminal justice system that often profited from mass incarceration—made mobility for millions an improbable future. Let’s examine some of these factors more closely.
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