Baltimore
When such cities as Atlanta and Charlotte enjoyed a job surge in the 20 years that began in 1990, for example, the job gains mostly bypassed residents — often African-American — who had been born into poverty.
That is among the findings of a study led by Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist whose newly launched Opportunity Atlas found no association between job growth and economic mobility for poor residents of the affected areas.
“Job growth is not sufficient by itself to create upward mobility,” Chetty said. “It’s almost as though racial disparities have been amplified by job growth.”
His finding challenges much of the conventional thinking, of government officials, business executives and economists, that job gains are the surest way to lift up people in impoverished communities.
President Donald Trump pledged to save neglected towns through “jobs, jobs, jobs.” His 2016 presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, asserted that government investments to foster hiring would help create “an economy that works for everyone.” Governors and mayors have traded tax breaks for pledges by companies to create jobs in distressed communities.
But Chetty and his colleagues, whose atlas examined communities down to Census tract levels, found that economic mobility hinges more frequently on other factors. A person’s race, for example, plays a pivotal role.
Economic mobility varied widely among people of different races who lived in the same neighborhoods in Los Angeles or Houston, among other places.
Additionally, living in neighborhoods with many two-parent families improves the likelihood of emerging from poverty — even when someone was raised by a single parent. Mobility is often greater for children who come from neighborhoods with higher-priced housing. And it’s generally better when a high proportion of adults in a neighborhood are working, according to the analysis by Chetty; economists Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard and John Friedman of Brown University; and researchers Sonya Porter and Maggie Jones of the Census Bureau.
“It has been a surprising finding,” Hendren said. “Places that have a lot of job growth don’t tend to be places that are better to grow up in.”
In the two decades that ended in 2010, the Atlanta and Charlotte areas were flooded with jobs. Yet many of those positions appear to have skipped over the residents who were born in those cities’ poorer neighborhoods.
The jobs were instead filled by college graduates who had moved to the South. At the same time, mobility worsened in neighborhoods with a high concentration of African-Americans.
Metro Pittsburgh, on the other hand, lost jobs between 1990 and 2010, yet its residents’ economic mobility improved as the area became a nexus for college graduates working in technology and health care.
In the Seattle area, the home of such corporate powerhouses as Amazon and Microsoft, both jobs and economic mobility grew over the same period. (Those gains have, in turn, caused home prices to jump to levels that could threaten continued economic mobility.)
Disparities exist not just among metro areas but also among neighborhoods within the same city, according to an Associated Press examination of the data in the Opportunity Atlas.
In Baltimore, the “Old Town” neighborhood near Johns Hopkins Hospital is a mecca of entrepreneurship. The number of jobs there surged 21 percent between 2004 and 2013, compared with job growth of just 3.4 percent nationally. Nearly 15,000 people work in the area because of the hospital, and 60 percent of the companies are younger than four years old, according to government data compiled by the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.
Yet the neighborhood is marked by abandoned storefronts, public housing and a 93 percent non-white population. More than half its residents live in poverty. Ninety percent of the children are raised by single parents. And the Opportunity Atlas shows that a low-income child from that neighborhood is likely to become even poorer as an adult.
Connecting its residents with employers has proved problematic, as it has in poor communities across the country. The disparity between residents and workers in the neighborhood suggests that the jobs have gone to people who either live in other, more prosperous neighborhoods or who commute from the surrounding suburbs.
For nearly four years, a program called Turn Around Tuesday has been trying to address this mismatch. Backed by the interfaith group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, the program seeks to match employers like Johns Hopkins to workers who have lived in poverty, have struggled with drug addiction or have criminal records but who are regarded as qualified for a job. Recently, about 40 people sat in a church basement of an otherwise desolate block of Baltimore to learn how to tell their personal stories to hiring managers — a first step toward getting and holding steady work.
Melvin Wilson, the co-director, opened with a prayer for them.
“Pray for jobs,” he said. “Though we’ve created 555 living-wage jobs, you know, as we know, God, that’s not enough.”
The gap in outcomes among Baltimore neighborhoods is hardly surprising to City Councilman Leon Pinkett, who represents a western slice of the city and has worked in economic development.
“What the data does for us,” he said of the research, “is that it validates all the things that we know to be true: That many of the residents of these communities start at a deficit, and little is done through policy or investments to assist them in closing that gap.”