The EconomistSeptember 28th 2019 Special reportPoverty in America 72 tiveloadforadultsisdaunting: scientists have measured it as
equivalent to shaving off 13 iqpoints.
Outside cities, poverty is more difficult to deal with because so-
cial services are harder to provide. Big cities—even quite poor ones
such as Baltimore and Detroit—are still able to operate the large
bureaucracies needed to help the poor. As a result, urban counties
spend ten times as much per person on support for poor residents
as suburban ones, according to Scott Allard of the University of
Washington. The small towns that struggle are less able to help
their residents. Their finances are in bad shape. They have barely
enough money to cover essential services like policing and street-
sweeping, let alone operate job-training programmes or compete
for complicated federal grants. Public transport is rare outside big
cities, and the costs of maintaining a car are too high for many.
Take Cleveland, Ohio, one of America’s poorest cities. Though
nearby Detroit is often thought of as even poorer, half the children
in Cleveland live in poverty, the highest rate of any large city in the
country. In the city’s central district, where public housing for
poor, black residents is still concentrated, the child-poverty rates
are estimated at 80%. “It’s the same recurring story,” says Shanda
Davis, a pastor and local activist in Cleveland’s Tremont neigh-
bourhood. “We have children who are displaced, mothers who
aren’t making enough, fathers who are walking away from their
own home life.”
Ms Davis, a kindly, soft-spoken woman, endured many of the
horrors of a poor and unstable upbringing: an alcoholic mother,
molestation while still a girl, dropping out of high school, getting
pregnant while young and domestic violence afterwards. Some-
how she pulled through. Her humble operation now dispenses
food, clothes and love to locals. “We pull out of our cabinets what-
ever we have. The scripture says to give what you have, and it be-
comes more than enough,” she says. Despite her efforts, the trou-
bles remain. Drug-dealing is common in the neighbourhood.
At least there are still some institutions that can help. The Sis-
ters of Charity Health System, which runs a nearby hospital, has
also set up a foundation hoping to break the cycle of intergenera-
tional poverty in the neighbourhood. Like Pittsburgh, the city of
Cleveland has the cultural and financial assets to get itself out of a
rut; it has a world-class hospital, a major research university, an
international airport and a few corporate headquarters.
Things are worse in small cities nearby. Youngstown, once a
booming centre of steel production with a peak population of
170,000, is now a hollowed-out town of 65,000. Bruce Springsteen
wrote a song about its decline. The poverty
rate is 37%, higher than in Cleveland. Re-
viving it will be hard. “Unlike Cleveland,
Youngstown has no assets. It’s experienced
extreme depopulation. There weren’t any
elite institutions there,” says Aaron Renn
of the Manhattan Institute, a think-tank.
As in most distressed places in America,
some residents still work to turn things
around. Ian Beniston runs the Youngstown
Neighbourhood Development Corporation
with a small staff and volunteers. They
clear rubbish from lawns, rehabilitate abandoned properties and
pester slumlords. “It’s basic stuff,” he admits. “But the most radical
thing we can do as young people is stay in cities like this.”
For Democrats and Republicans alike, priorities have shifted
away from saving persistently poor places in favour of more mid-
dle-class concerns like income inequality and lack of social mobil-
ity. President Donald Trump invokes the poverty in Baltimore only
as a cudgel against his political opponents. This makes little sense,
however, since ignoring the compounded disadvantages of pover-
ty condemns today’s poor children to becoming poor adults. And it
is all made more difficult by the problems of race. 7Sinkin’ down in YoungstownHalf the children
in Cleveland live
in poverty