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...
...But even to hope to deal effectively with urban poverty, he will have to define it...
...In the late sixties, welfare specialists talked about the unbreakable dependency generated by the system, leading to second and third-generation welfare families...
...The federal "poverty line" (actually a series of 124 income standards, varying by location and family size) can be seriously misleading...
...Some graduate students may fall into this class...
...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...
...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...
...So who are the urban poor...
...As specialists are increasingly complaining, the Census poverty index does not count "in-kind" income, such as government housing, food stamps, medicaid, and medicare...
...Perhaps this new approach is exaggerated...
...the area of the least is the industrialized North-central and Northeast...
...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...
...Most are probably single persons or childless couples...
...The program that may reduce the worst evils of poverty and of the earlier government programs is economic growth...
...Their actual benefits thus fall short of the annualized figure...
...Of the central-city poor, the Census says that slightly more were white than black...
...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...
...image...
...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...
...According to the new interpretation, long-term cases are in the minority...
...But the new mood among researchers reflects the changing pattern of the growth of welfare...
...In its cautious language, the study observed, "Welfare could clearly be an attractive alternative to employment...
...most "clients" alternate between periods on the dole and periods at "dead-end" jobs...
...This is not as easy as most people think...
...But the initial scholarly reaction to this phenomenon may have been too bleak...
...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...
...Our jubilation at this news, however, has been easy to restrain...
...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...
...Thus it exaggerates the number of the truly poor and understates the impact of some very expensive social welfare programs...
...The vast majority of the non-city poor were white...
...But the Census has considerably confused the issue by counting Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and other Hispanics as white...
...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...
...The area of greatest poverty is the agricultural South...
...The current welfare levels in some cities actually discourage people from seeking work...
...In the current circumstances, the debate over urban poverty should actually be a debate over the best means of obtaining and sustaining economic development...
...In some large cities, these groups are worse off than blacks...
...The simplest guideline is money, specifically the income threshold used in federal statistics...
...According to this basic standard, nearly 26 million Americans, 12 percent of the population, were poor in 1975...
...The rolls levelled off at the end of the sixties largely because most of the eligible population had been signed up...
...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...
...But the largest single factor may be age...
...More recently, they have focused on the apparent high turnover in the welfare caseload...
...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...
...More recent changes in size have reflected the changing condition of the economy...
...This hypothesis is confirmed by a RAND Corporation study of New York City's welfare program, released in September 1976...
...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...
...The total income for the average case, assuming the family stayed on welfare the year round, was nearly $2,000 above the poverty line...
...New welfare cases are frequently long-term unemployed who have exhausted their benefits...
...But that, as the poet has said, is another story...
...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 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...
...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...
...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 the reverse of this situation is that these people are anxious to return to work as the economy improves...
...18 The American Spectator February 1978...
...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...
...Some, we admit, may be welfare families who are not on the rolls 12 months out of the year...
Vol. 11 • February 1978 • No. 4
