Mark Winston Griffith

Complex Poverty or Poverty Complex?

When I was in the second grade a car screeched to a halt in front of my family's home in Central Brooklyn. Two men jumped out, followed in hot pursuit by two cops who engaged the men in a shootout. Within months of this incident my mother made my father move our entire family to the relatively quiet suburban enclave of Laurelton Queens. There we found other families had similarly fled the relatively grey, crime-ridden streets of Brooklyn and the Bronx. A few years after we settled down into our new home a man was shot dead by another man on our neighbor's front lawn.

Had we fled the ghetto or had we simply packed it up and moved it to a leafier side of the street?

A December 28 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, "Scene Change. How Much Does A Neighborhood Affect the Poor?", asks a similar question of people living in poverty, writ large:

"Beginning in 1994, the federal government offered a lottery for housing vouchers to families in five major cities...One group received vouchers to be used specifically to subsidize rents in neighborhoods where poverty was low...Another group...wasn't offered vouchers and, initially at least, stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods. Researchers have since tracked and compared the fortunes of the two groups.

"Free them from the poisonous cocktail of drugs and crime brewing in city ghettos, scholars reasoned, and the families would have a chance to leave poverty behind...But results show that may only partially be true."

The article goes on to cite that the adults in the families that moved grew physically and mentally healthier. The girls in the study did better in school, abused alcohol at a lower rate and generally thrived. However the teenage boys, the study found, in some cases become deeper involved in criminal activity. Perhaps most interestingly, the families who moved away did not do appreciably better income wise.

The study, among other things, barely begins to unpack the myriad features -- crummy life options, bad health conditions, poor public education, unemployment, racial dynamics, low paying jobs - that are generally and indiscriminately shoved inside the social construct of "poverty". It confirms that while environmental factors such as dilapidated housing and overcrowding certainly reinforce poverty, only a comprehensive, multi-generational shift in policies and conditions can hope to have a transformative effect on struggling communities. In other words, the playing field is so remarkably uneven, it requires more than a little dirt and grass tossed onto one side of it to make it level. This should give pause to think tankers, foundation program officers and non-profit developers looking to promote the next anti-poverty silver bullet.

Looking back on my days in Southeast Queens, I remember the good public schools that helped pave the way for me and others to attend Ivy League universities; the safety of my latchkey kid existence; the civic pride I found on every street corner.

I also remember the way real estate agents steered all the Black people to the same areas in Southeast Queens. I remember being spat upon by the white folks who lived on the other side of the Parkway in Rosedale. I remember how commerical retailers and providers of some basic amenities gradually abandoned the neighborhood. I remember so many of my male friends, seemingly lost in the wilderness, determined to remained unsoftened by the 'burbs, pursuing a thug lifestyle that eventually ate them alive.

As for my siblings, my father and me -- middle class, now, all of us -- we all eventually moved out of Laurelton -- back to Central Brooklyn.

Posted at 9:13 AM, Dec 29, 2006 in Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)