|
ITROW Research Projects - Neighborhoods and Gendered Child
Development
A Central Focus: The Economic
Opportunity Structure in Central Cities
Because the majority
of people in poverty are women and their children, the Institute's
Neighborhood Research Group began with an interest in the causes and
consequences of poverty at the community level. For modern U.S. cities,
to understand poverty and its effects, it is important to examine the
economic restructuring currently taking place in the United States and
in the world. Studies of poverty in the United States often point to
cultural or family characteristics of the poor as the main source of
poverty. Less studied are the broader effects of the shift from factory
employment to service employment, corporate downsizing, wage and salary
polarization, and stagnant and falling wages. Few have examined these
factors in depth, and even fewer have considered gender in their
analyses.
To begin this work,
the Institute's Neighborhood Research Group started with a look at the
availability of life-sustaining work, particularly for those people who
have less education and are less skilled, and who live in central
cities. The broader picture and long-term projections are not
encouraging. Since the 1970s, the economy of the United States has gone
through two important changes: (a) economic restructuring characterized
by a decline in manufacturing jobs and growth in service jobs, coupled
with the increasing use of part-time and temporary workers; and (b) a
growing concentration of wealth and income among the top 20 percent of
the population and a diminution in wealth and income among the lower
quartiles (Karoly 1992).
The move from
manufacturing to service and telecommunications has resulted in a
decline in men’s traditionally heavy labor and an increase in jobs at
both the top and bottom of the occupational ladder (Gittleman and Howell
1995). The decline in protected unionized manufacturing jobs dominated
by white men also has been accompanied by a shift to lesser-skilled and
lower-paid jobs performed by women and men of color. Not only has the
demand for lesser educated workers declined in cities and made
competition fierce, but there has been a significant erosion in wages,
especially for workers who had low wages initially (Acs and Danziger
1993; Bound and Holzer 1993; Newman 1995). This often makes it
necessary for more household members, particularly women, to generate
incomes (Tienda, Smith, and Ortiz 1987). These shifts have had severe
consequences in central cities (Acs and Danziger 1993; Bound and Holzer
1993; Bourgois 1995; Kasarda 1989; Wilson 1987, 1996), impeding the
ability of poor, working people to find jobs that provide subsistence
wages, hold together families, and raise children who then can become
productive adults. Deteriorating economic conditions often lead to
increased concentrations of poverty, community disorganization, and a
decline in levels of neighborhood safety and security. These conditions
may in turn contribute to the disruption of interpersonal relations in
the family and household, and may affect the psychological well-being of
adults in the households, as well as their ability to provide for their
families. These changes have increased the problems associated with
economic survival of single mothers, who are more likely than men or
married mothers to be poor, and who more often than not are the primary
care-takers and economic supporters of children.
Interest in economic conditions has
recently been promoted by William Julius Wilson (1987, 1991, 1996), who
focuses on the connections between structural changes in the economy of
the city and the behavior of residents of inner-city, poor
neighborhoods. Wilson maintains that a community’s economic opportunity
structure is important because it affects the economic health of
families living in the community. If few jobs are available in the
neighborhood area, then most family members either have to commute to
jobs; obtain supplemental funding from governmental sources; engage in
illegal money-making activities; reduce their level of economic
subsistence; or some combination of these activities. Each of these
options has consequences for children.
The importance of the economic
opportunities available to community residents for child and adolescent
behavior also is suggested by
Mercer Sullivan’ study (1989) of three poor inner city Brooklyn
neighborhoods
¾
one black, one Puerto Rican, and one white working class. His findings
illustrate how neighborhood resources in employment opportunities impact
both the jobs young people obtained and their involvement in criminal
activities. Sullivan studied variations in the resources
neighborhoods provided in three communities:
- In Hamilton Park, a white ethnic
working-class community, the youth and their parents had connections
to the business and police in the community, lived near many jobs,
and had social ties with local employers. These youth did better in
obtaining part-time jobs both while in high school as well as when
they graduated or left school, than youth in the other two
communities. Several factories provided somewhat better paid
factory work for the young men of the community.
- In sharp contrast to Hamilton Park
was Projectville, a poor black community concentrated in public
housing “projects,” where people were physically isolated from
centers of work leading to the highest rates of joblessness of youth
in their mid-teens of any of the three neighborhoods.
- The youth in the third community, La
Barriada, a “lower-class,” poor Puerto Rican neighborhood, lived
closer to major concentrations of jobs provided by local factories
and small landlords. However, far fewer jobs were available to them
since these jobs were usurped (in their minds) by the even lower
paid immigrants. As they got older, these men still worked at low
paying, unskilled manual work, when they could find such work.
The deleterious effect of unemployment on
youth's aspirations is suggested by Skogan’s (1990) review of five
studies of neighborhood crime problems in major cities. Skogan
illustrated the effects of the precipitous decline of the economy, in
particular the loss of industrial sector jobs, on youthful aspirations
by quoting the words of a respondent:
I can't see any future in Woodlawn,
at least not for myself. I can't see staying down here because it's
a dead end. . . . It's a dead end because you can't find no jobs
down here; you have to go outside the neighborhood to find a job.
You look up and down 63d street and most of the stores that are up
in here are boarded up or gone or burned up. So there's really no
future here. There's no job opportunities for young people. All we
do is sit around or lay around on the streets every day doing
nothing. You ought to see them, its all they do is get high, play
basketball, walk around doing nothing. [Woodlawn, Chicago] (p.
175).
Many prior research projects have
examined the influence of community economic opportunity factors by
looking at the impact of unemployment on specific dependent variables.
For example, supporting the idea that high neighborhood unemployment
leads to higher rates of juvenile delinquency, Sampson (1987) examined
race-specific rates of robbery and homicide by juveniles and adults in
over 150 US cities in 1980, and found that high crime rates stem from
structural linkages among unemployment, economic deprivation, and family
disruption in urban black communities. (The effect of male joblessness
is indirect, he found, working through family disruption.)
|
 |
|
