Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the ...disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality.Coming of Age in the Other Americashows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who hailed from the nation's poorest neighborhoods and show how the right public policies might help break the cycle of disadvantage.
Coming of Age in the Other Americailluminates the profound effects of neighborhoods on impoverished families. The authors conducted in-depth interviews and fieldwork with 150 young adults, and found that those who had been able to move to better neighborhoods-either as part of the Moving to Opportunity program or by other means-achieved much higher rates of high school completion and college enrollment than their parents. About half the youth surveyed reported being motivated by an "identity project"-or a strong passion such as music, art, or a dream job-to finish school and build a career.
Yet the authors also found troubling evidence that some of the most promising young adults often fell short of their goals and remained mired in poverty. Factors such as neighborhood violence and family trauma put these youth on expedited paths to adulthood, forcing them to shorten or end their schooling and find jobs much earlier than their middle-class counterparts. Weak labor markets and subpar postsecondary educational institutions, including exploitative for-profit trade schools and under-funded community colleges, saddle some young adults with debt and trap them in low-wage jobs. A third of the youth surveyed-particularly those who had not developed identity projects-were neither employed nor in school. To address these barriers to success, the authors recommend initiatives that help transform poor neighborhoods and provide institutional support for the identity projects that motivate youth to stay in school. They propose increased regulation of for-profit schools and increased college resources for low-income high school students.
Coming of Age in the Other Americapresents a sensitive, nuanced account of how a generation of ambitious but underprivileged young Baltimoreans has struggled to succeed. It both challenges long-held myths about inner-city youth and shows how the process of "social reproduction"-where children end up stuck in the same place as their parents-is far from inevitable.
This article revisits the Moving to Opportunity housing mobility experiment, which heretofore has not provided strong evidence to support the hypothesis of neighborhood effects on economic ...self-sufficiency among adults. The authors undertake a conceptual and empirical analysis of the study's design and implementation to gain a better understanding of the selection processes that occur within the study. The article shows that the study is potentially affected by selectivity at several junctures: in determining who complied with the program's requirements, who entered integrated versus segregated neighborhoods, and who left neighborhoods after initial relocation. Furthermore, previous researchers have not found an experimental treatment effect on adult economic self-sufficiency, relative to controls. The authors propose an alternative approach that involves measuring the cumulative amount of time spent in different neighborhood environments. With this method, they find evidence that neighborhood is associated with outcomes such as employment, earnings, TANF receipt, and use of food stamps. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Tens of thousands of families have been relocated from public housing in the last decade through the HOPE VI redevelopment initiative. Analyzing in‐depth interviews with 41 families who were ...relocated from a severely distressed public housing development, I explore how neighborhood‐based social capital is drawn upon for safety by examining how people kept safe in public housing, and what happens when these social ties are taken away through forced relocation. I find that their relatively new status in these neighborhoods translates into less socializing and weaker local ties. Moreover, since they counted on social ties for protection previously, this lack of integration leaves a substantial portion feeling more vulnerable.
“Todo el mundo daba la cara por tí”: Lazos sociales, percepciones sobre seguridad personal y reubicación desde los proyectos habitacionales públicos (Susan Clampet‐Lundquist)
Resumen
Durante la última década, decenas de miles de familias han sido reubicadas fuera de los proyectos habitacionales públicos a través de la iniciativa de renovación urbana HOPE VI. A partir del análisis de entrevistas en profundidad con cuarenta y una familias reubicadas fuera de un proyecto habitacional público en extremo estado de abandono, exploro cómo el capital social comunitario es utilizado para garantizar la seguridad personal. Para ello, examino cómo la gente lograba protegerse en los proyectos habitacionales públicos y lo que ocurre cuando estos lazos sociales desaparecen vía la reubicación forzada. Mis resultados indican que el estatus relativamente nuevo de la gente reubicada se traduce en menores niveles de socialización y lazos sociales más débiles a nivel local. Mas aún, dado que anteriormente estas familias recurrían a sus lazos sociales para proteger su seguridad personal, esta falta de integración deja a una parte significativa de las mismas sintiéndose más vulnerables.
Severely distressed public housing developments are being torn down and redeveloped through the HOPE (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere) VI initiative in cities across the United States. ...This article examines how families from one HOPE VI site decided where to move and how they fared in building social ties with their new neighbors. Semistructured interviews from a random sample of 41 families with children were analyzed.
Families that chose to move into public housing expressed concern about the unreliability of the Section 8 program and their own ability to pay the extra utility costs involved. Those who used Section 8 vouchers to relocate had more education on average and made this choice to improve the neighborhood for their families. Over the past two years, regardless of what kind of neighborhood they moved into, families have not rebuilt the close ties most of them had in their former neighborhood.
Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of ...risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 teens in Baltimore and Chicago. They find that daily routines, fitting in with neighborhood norms, neighborhood navigation strategies, interactions with peers, friendship making, and distance from father figures may contribute to how girls who moved via MTO benefited more than boys.
We conducted an in-depth interview study with 77 young men in three moderate to high-crime neighborhoods in Philadelphia to hear their stories about community violence and relations with police. In ...this article, we have analyzed how Latino, African-American, and white young men experience policing and how they discuss the guidelines around cooperation with the police and what they view as snitching. Contrary to popular perception, talking to the police is not always banned in poor or high-crime neighborhoods. Instead, the respondents present a variety of personal rules that they use to assess when cooperation is called for. We argue that the policing they experience within disadvantaged neighborhoods shapes their frame of legal cynicism, which in turn makes decisions not to cooperate with the police more likely.
This article uses mixed methods to identify factors that account for the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty, drawing on longitudinal data from the Moving to Opportunity study in ...Baltimore from 1994 to 2010. We use quantitative survey data from 504 young adults and qualitative interview data from 51 young adults to examine family characteristics during childhood that account for residence in high-poverty neighborhoods in young adulthood, considering whether housing assistance interacts with these characteristics to break the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty. In combination with housing assistance, family economic resources, social ties to high-poverty neighborhoods, entrenchment in high-poverty neighborhoods, and parents' neighborhood experiences and expectations influence where young adults live in the next generation. Housing assistance has both replacement effects-substituting for what families lack-and enhancement effects-enabling families with more resources-on the intergenerational durability of neighborhood poverty. This study contributes to our understanding of neighborhood selection, intergenerational neighborhood outcomes, and the role of housing assistance.
Why are some life outcomes difficult to predict? We investigated this question through in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 families sampled from a multidecade longitudinal study. Our sampling and ...interviewing process was informed by the earlier efforts of hundreds of researchers to predict life outcomes for participants in this study. The qualitative evidence we uncovered in these interviews combined with a mathematical decomposition of prediction error led us to create a conceptual framework. Our specific evidence and our more general framework suggest that unpredictability should be expected in many life outcome prediction tasks, even in the presence of complex algorithms and large datasets. Our work provides a foundation for future empirical and theoretical work on unpredictability in human lives.
No More 'Bois Ball Clampet-Lundquist, Susan
Journal of adolescent research,
05/2007, Letnik:
22, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Over the past decade, tens of thousands of families have been relocated from public housing developments across the United States through HOPE VI redevelopment and demolition. The experiences of ...young people who, along with their families, are relocated from their homes are rarely given attention. In this article, the author analyzes qualitative interviews from 22 adolescents who were relocated from a public housing development 2 years before the interview. Themes drawn from the teens' narratives point to an overall loss in intergenerational connections and institutional ties in their new neighborhoods compared with their former neighborhoods. These findings have implications for how we view mixed outcomes for low-income adolescents in other relocation studies, such as the Moving To Opportunity demonstration.
Baltimore Teens and Work Clampet-Lundquist, Susan
Journal of adolescent research,
01/2013, Letnik:
28, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this article, I explore how African American teens, all of whom spent some years in high-poverty neighborhoods in Baltimore, talk about their experiences looking for work and working, including ...under-the-table work. I find three patterns that shape these early employment experiences. First, before males and females are legally allowed to work, their money-making opportunities are largely gender-segregated, with boys in this sample more likely to use illegal means to make money. Second, gender-segregated routines and occupations may work in favor of females. Finally, as nearly all of these households are female-headed, girls have a same-sex role model from whom they can pattern their behavior. To the extent that the mother is working, this may encourage females to work more so than males.
