Deconcentrating poverty or deconcentrating affluence?

Many people do not realize how wealthy they are relative to the rest of the District, the country, or worldwide. DC, in fact, has the most households in the nation making over $200,000 (8.4% of households or 21,194 households) and has the highest Gini coefficient (.534) in the US, that is, the highest level of inequality nationwide, according to the Census. To make it into the top 5% of American household incomes, your household has to make at least $188,000. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in DC, those in the following jobs would quite easily make it into the top 5%:

• Surgeon, $241,330
• General internist, $217,330
• Chief Executive, $198,120

 or as a two-earner household:

• Family and general practitioner, $173,050
• Lawyer, $159,790
• Sales manager, $136,920
• PR and fundraising managers $129,940
• Database administrator, $95,690

Where is your household in the income hierarchy? (See here). Where does Ward 6 fit into the income hierarchy? 

Using the Census' American Community Survey, I looked at census tracts 71 (the long-standing lowest-income census tract in Ward 6) and 67 (the long-standing wealthiest census tract in Ward 6)(1).


You can see that these two census tracts are very close to each other. From the data, I found that census tract 67 has a very large percentage of households making over $200,000: about 30% of census tract 67 makes $200,000 or more, while only 5% do in census tract 71. In addition, no families live in poverty in census tract 67, while it is estimated that 47% of those in census tract 71 do. It is further estimated that about 70% of those living in poverty in census tract 71 are under 18 years of age; they are children. Interestingly, census tract 71 looks much more like the rest of the country than census tract 67. The wealth of census tract 67 and the poverty of census tract 71 are, in fact, related.

Many people think that poverty can be reduced by "deconcentrating" poverty, by moving the poor away from areas with concentrated poverty. At the American Sociological Association annual conference this August, sociologists working on poverty and race -- such as Professors William Julius Wilson, Mary Patillo, and Douglas Massey, whom I heard speak -- demonstrated that displacing the poor in almost all cases will not help them because they are usually displaced to areas with even more concentrated poverty. Rather, poverty and inequality have to be dealt with where the poor live, recognizing that areas of poverty and areas of wealth are interrelated.

Alternatively, given the lack of households living in poverty in census tract 67, it might make sense if several of the families living in poverty in census tract 71 moved to census tract 67. In his article about public housing, British geography professor Tom Slater has argued that the problem is not the concentration of poverty but rather the "concentration of affluence" in which people are "utterly insulated from the dignified daily struggles endured" by their neighbors and do not realize that their own actions and decisions impact the lives of those living in poverty. How might Ward 6 deconcentrate affluence?

(1) In this case, the American Community Survey surveyed large samples of households over 2007-2011. Since the survey does not include everyone in the country, it produces only estimates.

Back in DC

Professors like everyone else do a lot of multi-tasking. As we move up the ranks, we end up taking on more research projects (because so many topics are so interesting and/or need to be researched), as well as helping run our professions (training graduate students, running conferences, editing scholarly journals, and so on) and our universities (professors basically run the universities). It is all fascinating work, while at the same time a bit unwieldy.

I spent July in St. Louis, where I conducted research on the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project. Then, I spent August in New York City, where I conducted research on the Non-Aligned Movement. Many people don't know what the Non-Aligned Movement is. Basically, in the 1950s, Third World countries that had become independent from the colonial powers decided to end their dependence on (or alignment with) the United States, the Soviet Union, and many of the former colonial powers. They focused on working together by investing in, producing with, and buying from each other. I am studying the companies, banks, export promotion agencies, regional integration groups, and other economic organizations they created, which we can see as economic globalization. OPEC is just one example of a non-aligned economic organization, which provided new investment funds for Third World production. Many DC residents likely followed the Non-Aligned Movement quite closely during its most successful period in the 1960s and 1970s.

While I put together my next post, I want to highlight a great photo essay by Larry Janezich on Ward 6's Franks Place:

Franks Place: One of the First Capitol Hill Neighborhood Vendors
by Larry Janezich

Frank Lloyd has stationed his business on the corner of 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, since 1984, selling sunglasses, hats, t-shirts and other merchandise to passersby.

Frank Lloyd. Photo by Larry Janezich.

  “I first set up on Metro Plaza,” he says, but “they moved me over here.”  “Over here” is the sidewalk next to CVS where he sets up five or six days a week...

While vending is Lloyd’s livelihood, drumming is his passion...At first self-taught, Lloyd later trained with the Andrew Cacho African Drummers and Dancers, a group founded in the early 70s which taught African Dance and Drumming to youths at Friendship House and later at a location on 8^th Street... Read more here.   

Yes, Friendship House provided many resources to Ward 6...