If the rest of the country doesn't see the poor, we don't have to pay much attention to the quality of the services being provided to them. It doesn't matter that they may not be benefiting from the various social service programs that exist on paper to assist them.

The rest of the country does not see the poor because it does not want to. It is a social stigma. Class-ism is as much of a problem in this country as racism. More so because it is invisable and easily ignored.

You could place a poor family along with all the necessary accoutrements in Martha's Vineyard and they would still be poor and treated as such.

C

You'll never stop people from self-segregating and we have largely local control of zoning so... yeah... putting up low income housing in higher income neighborhoods isn't always feasible.

So that leaves option 2, which is to expand services in poor areas. Another non-starter since the poor have very little political clout and because poor people do tend to get poor programs.

This is going to sound stupid but what we need is a Poor PAC. Because until the money's there to nudge elections, all of this is politically impossible.

Dean raises many good points here, as do other participants. If I’m correct, Dean is referring to the Moving To Opportunity (MTO) studies that followed housing assistance recipients who moved to lower poverty neighborhoods compared to those that rented homes in higher-poverty neighborhoods. These studies generally find little evidence of improved work outcomes for adults and only modest effects in a few health or school measures for children in families who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, I believe place is critical to how the safety net helps working poor families (and I think many familiar with MTO would agree). Today, social service programs offering job training, adult education, emergency food and cash assistance, housing, mental health, substance abuse, and child care receive about $150 to $200 billion a year - tens of billions of dollars more than what is spent on welfare, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and unemployment insurance combined. You can mail someone a food stamp benefit card or an EITC check and be reasonably sure that people in different neighborhoods and communities are getting comparable levels of help. You cannot, however, mail job training or child care to someone – this makes the location of social service programs so critical.

Consistent across many different neighborhoods in several different cities, I find that living in high-poverty predominately minority neighborhoods gives one about half as much access to social service programs as living in low-poverty predominately white neighborhoods. In a manner that might be described as a perverse reality of today's safety net, these mismatches in access to services appear to reinforce the lack of access to job opportunities, affordable housing, and quality schools that is consistently found to exist in high-poverty neighborhoods.

Now there may be many circumstances where locating a program or service provider close to high-poverty areas is not ideal or conducive to successful programs. For example, employment services may be more likely to locate closer to employers and job growth, often outside of central city areas. Programs that provide assistance to particularly vulnerable populations, such as victims of domestic violence, may choose to locate some distance from their primary client populations in order to maintain confidentiality and ensure safety. In general, however, most providers do not expect clients to travel great distances.

Two questions emerge. Why do mismatches exist? What do we do to reduce the spatial isolation of poor families? I’ll post on both questions later, but will begin to answer the latter here.

As federal and state budget deficits suggest, we are unlikely to see an influx of new public resources to antipoverty programs in the coming years. Even maintaining social service expenditure levels of the late-1990s or early-2000s would be a major accomplishment in many states and communities. So, a massive investment in our safety net infrastructure is unlikely. Also unlikely are great expansions of housing voucher programs. After years of cuts under President George W. Bush, we may see modest expansion in housing voucher assistance under the current administration – but even a 10% increase in funding would fall short of the demand for voucher assistance among working poor families. NIMBYism also poses a significant obstacle to relocating service providers and to increasing the mobility of working poor families.

With these constraints and limitations on “bigger” government solutions in mind, I put a few suggestions forward as to how we can better connect low-income persons to safety net programs that can help them achieve greater economic and personal well-being:

1) Federal, state, and local initiatives to strengthen smaller faith-based and community-based secular nonprofit organizations are critical steps in achieving a sound public safety net and increasing the availability of assistance to poor populations. Such agencies often are trusted within communities, which can make them effective partners in expanding social service provision to currently underserved areas.

2) While our focus is often on promoting residential mobility through housing programs, we should not lose sight of policy tools that could remedy the problems posed by housing instability. A large percentage of low-income families make at least one residential move each year, many are from one poor housing situation to another. Volatility in housing arrangements weakens ties to employers, schools, and service providers.

3) More attention needs to be paid to the space and facility needs of nonprofit service organizations. Because most funding is for programs or services and not for relocation or space acquisition, many nonprofit organizations may struggle to locate proximate to client populations. Assistance to nonprofits may come through direct funding for capital investment or through efforts to create office space where nonprofits can collocate to be accessible to poor populations.

4) Private giving, while accounting for a very small share of total funding, is an important source of support for many nonprofits and social service programs. Often times we give to the organizations we know and live near. Instead, communities could develop strategies to help target philanthropy of all kinds to organizations working in the toughest to serve neighborhoods.

5) Finally, as a teaser for a later post, we should be paying more attention to the consequences of the suburbanization of poverty. Poverty is not just for central cities any more.

Dean, why do you spend an entire paragraph on the studies that demonstrate that your conclusions are simply wrong before telling us what your conclusions are?

That's terrible rhetoric.

Your post doesn't give any reason why the studies you recap (without citing) are wrong... it just says they must be, since there are all these services that poor people would get if they lived in more mixed neighborhoods.

Instead, perhaps it would be more consistent to suggest that the services don't make as much difference as people suggest. That the difference between Dupont Circle and Anacostia isn't services at all; it's culture.

Of course, changing culture doesn't sound like a government program TPMers would get on board with. Let's throw money at it instead?

Does anyone else see a big fat parallel to "de-institutionalizaton"?