Looking for the Urban Poor
Adams, James Ring
"Looking for the Urban Poor" James Ring Adams Looking for the Urban Poor When Jimmy Carter gets around to unleashing his new "national urban policy," the fight against "urban poverty" is sure to be the main attraction. But...
...In the late sixties, welfare specialists talked about the unbreakable dependency generated by the system, leading to second and third-generation welfare families...
...Of the central-city poor, the Census says that slightly more were white than black...
...In its cautious language, the study observed, "Welfare could clearly be an attractive alternative to employment...
...This point explains the mysterious phenomenon so vividly described by Daniel Patrick Moynihan—sharply increasing welfare rolls at a time, the mid-sixties, when the unemployment rate was declining sharply...
...A recent income-distribution study of New York City revealed that about eight percent of the family heads earning under $4,000 had four or more years of higher education...
...Most are probably single persons or childless couples...
...According to the new interpretation, long-term cases are in the minority...
...Although they are legally eligible for medicaid and food stamps available to AFDC families, there are fewer people from this group, because of either pride or simple ignorance, who take advantage of these programs...
...But even to hope to deal effectively with urban poverty, he will have to define it...
...In New York, it appears that many of these case closings can be attributed to paper shuffling, since the same families showed up on the rolls again a month later with no change in their condition...
...In some large cities, these groups are worse off than blacks...
...The RAND study, which assumed its control group had no outside sources of income, estimated that up to 17 percent of AFDC families with four members might still fall below the poverty line...
...The rolls levelled off at the end of the sixties largely because most of the eligible population had been signed up...
...In the current circumstances, the debate over urban poverty should actually be a debate over the best means of obtaining and sustaining economic development...
...This hypothesis is confirmed by a RAND Corporation study of New York City's welfare program, released in September 1976...
...In the only other states that have tried to figure out the worth of the total welfare package—California and Michigan—these results held true as well...
...Moreover, the CBO discovered that these programs were most effective in the northern industrial triangle, from Michigan to Maine, where, under the new count, the incidence of poverty was less than half that in the South...
...But the new mood among researchers reflects the changing pattern of the growth of welfare...
...More recently, they have focused on the apparent high turnover in the welfare caseload...
...This study reviewed more than 42,000 cases from the AFDC program (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), which is what people usually have in mind when they talk about welfare, and summed up the cash value of all the other benefits these families received—food stamps, medicaid, and so forth...
...The vast majority of the non-city poor were white...
...But the largest single factor may be age...
...But the bulk of the statistical poor hardly fit the conventional James Ring Adams, an occasional contributor to The American Spectator, is a feature and editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal...
...The current welfare levels in some cities actually discourage people from seeking work...
...But the initial scholarly reaction to this phenomenon may have been too bleak...
...These figures suggest a startling hypothesis—that poverty, strictly defined, is a less serious problem in the central cities, where social services are more readily available, than in the suburbs and countryside...
...The simplest guideline is money, specifically the income threshold used in federal statistics...
...This is not as easy as most people think...
...As specialists are increasingly complaining, the Census poverty index does not count "in-kind" income, such as government housing, food stamps, medicaid, and medicare...
...Nine million of these lived in the central cities, some six million more lived in the surrounding metropolitan areas, and 11 million lived in the countryside...
...Some, we admit, may be welfare families who are not on the rolls 12 months out of the year...
...Thus it exaggerates the number of the truly poor and understates the impact of some very expensive social welfare programs...
...The RAND Corporation, the Congressional Budget Office, and several revisionist scholars are now telling us that welfare and poverty are not synonymous, in fact that welfare has by and large abolished urban poverty...
...So who are the urban poor...
...The most miserable people in the city are not likely to be welfare mothers or unemployed black teenagers, but those elderly whose only source of income is social security...
...The total income for the average case, assuming the family stayed on welfare the year round, was nearly $2,000 above the poverty line...
...Some graduate students may fall into this class...
...18 The American Spectator February 1978...
...most "clients" alternate between periods on the dole and periods at "dead-end" jobs...
...the area of the least is the industrialized North-central and Northeast...
...image...
...But the reverse of this situation is that these people are anxious to return to work as the economy improves...
...The problem of the big-city poor has been alleviated to a large extent by replacing it with the problem of the big-city welfare recipient...
...But the Census has considerably confused the issue by counting Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and other Hispanics as white...
...Our jubilation at this news, however, has been easy to restrain...
...More recent changes in size have reflected the changing condition of the economy...
...Their actual benefits thus fall short of the annualized figure...
...Perhaps this new approach is exaggerated...
...According to this basic standard, nearly 26 million Americans, 12 percent of the population, were poor in 1975...
...But that, as the poet has said, is another story...
...According to the RAND study, 95 percent of the four-person AFDC families in New York City make more in total benefits than the family head would receive working full-time, year-round, at the minimum wage...
...New welfare cases are frequently long-term unemployed who have exhausted their benefits...
...The federal "poverty line" (actually a series of 124 income standards, varying by location and family size) can be seriously misleading...
...The program that may reduce the worst evils of poverty and of the earlier government programs is economic growth...
...The area of greatest poverty is the agricultural South...
...In a recent report which restated the Census to account for this aid, the Congressional Budget Office reduced the poverty population to one-third its previous size...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
