University Times

Patrick T. Sharkey

Racial inequalities can be more fully understood as a product of the neighborhoods people live in, according to a New York University sociology faculty member who claims the effects of poverty multiply over successive generations.

In failing to examine the long-term effects, “We’re missing a lot of important history here. We’re missing the legacy of growing up in a disadvantaged environment,” said Patrick T. Sharkey in his Dec. 3 lecture, “A Multigenerational Perspective on Neighborhoods and Racial Inequality,” hosted by the Center for Race and Social Policy.

“When we focus on neighborhood poverty and the effects of growing up in a poor neighborhood, we focus on where families live right now. We focus on the conditions surrounding families right now, ignoring the history of where families have lived and the experience that families have had and the institutions with which families have come into contact over long periods of time,” said Sharkey.

Sharkey, author of the 2013 book, “Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality,” called for the development of durable urban policy agendas — sustainable initiatives that have the power to disrupt those long-term trends — as the way to change the negative outcomes for families in those communities.

He noted that about 52 percent of African-American families have lived in the poorest one-fourth of all American neighborhoods over the course of two generations, compared with only about 7 percent of white families.

And, “when we look at families currently living in poor neighborhoods, we find that about 80 percent of African-American families who are currently living in poor neighborhoods have lived in similarly poor neighborhoods over the past two generations,” he said.

“If kids are going to school in a deficient learning environment, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the parents of that child were also attending a deficient school in a deficient learning environment. If kids are exposed to areas of cities with higher levels of toxins in the soil, with lead in the pipes, with lower quality air to breathe, it’s overwhelmingly likely that their parents were also exposed to the same disadvantaged environment when they were growing up,” he said.

“This legacy of growing up in a poor neighborhood doesn’t disappear when parents have kids and start to raise their own children,” he said. “In order to understand inequality, in order to understand the link between neighborhoods and racial inequality, I argue that we have to take a multigenerational perspective. We have to see the inequality that exists now as a continuation of the inequality that’s existed for at least two generations,” he said. “When we do that, we come to a very different picture of racial inequality.”

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The 1960s brought tremendous progress toward racial equality, Sharkey said, citing the emergence of the black middle class and the removal of formal legal barriers to upward mobility. However, “racial inequality since the early 1970s really has not declined much,” he said, citing as one example national income distribution trends that show little financial progress for African-American families.

In the early 1970s, 38-39 percent of African Americans were in the poorest fifth of U.S. income distribution, Sharkey said, noting that by 2010, 35-36 percent were in the least-affluent quintile.

Likewise, there has been little change in the ranks of the most affluent. In 1971, 8 or 9 percent of African Americans were in the top fifth in income distribution, with about 9 percent in the top quintile in 2010.

“This figure actually overstates the amount of progress that’s been made,” he said, noting that the statistics — taken from the current U.S. census population survey — fail to account for “the explosion of incarceration and the institutionalized population” who are not included in those numbers.

In addition, an influx of new black immigrants, “who have done better than those African Americans who have been here over long periods of time,” artificially boost the statistics upward, Sharkey said.

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In making his argument for the multigenerational aspects of racial inequality, Sharkey said an examination of upward or downward mobility is telling:  Over the past two generations, for children who grew up with the opportunities gained through the civil rights era, about 35 percent of black children have grown up and moved into a higher position in the income distribution than their parents, compared to about 45 percent of whites. At the same time, 53 percent of African Americans have moved downward relative to their parents, compared to about 41 percent of whites.

Also, statistics from 2006 that compare the “racial mobility gap” — race-based income differences among children raised in middle-class families — show that, on average, white children raised in middle-income families went on to earn more than their parents did: about $74,000 in adjusted dollars, compared to about $56,000 for their parents. Black children from similar backgrounds tended to grow up to earn less than their parents did a generation earlier: on average, about $45,000 compared to their parents’ $54,000, he said.

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Dominant social-science approaches are limited because they tend to focus on characteristics of families without considering the effect of environments on the persistence of racial inequality, Sharkey said.

“To understand this high level of downward economic mobility among families — black families that were doing fairly well a generation ago — we have to consider the environments in which families have lived over long periods of time. We have to consider what is bundled up within a community that affects the life chances of children” — attending schools that may have lacked in resources or quality teachers; exposure to pollution or violence, or being exposed to social networks that offer greater or fewer opportunities.

“If we go back in time and think not just about a child’s neighborhood but also about the neighborhood in which a child’s parents were raised a generation earlier, now we move from a fairly straightforward model of how neighborhoods might affect the life chances of kids to a much more complex set of pathways by which the neighborhood environment, as experienced over multiple generations of a family, becomes linked … cumulatively affecting children’s outcomes a generation later,” he said.

“Where a parent grew up can affect not just the quality of the schools that that parent attended, but also the economic opportunities available to that parent, the set of romantic partners available to that parent and their economic opportunities, the mental health, the parenting style, the income, etc.,” Sharkey noted. “All of these effects of the parent’s neighborhood environment don’t disappear when that parent now has a child.”

Children from families in which both they and their parent grew up in a poor neighborhood scored about 16 points lower on cognitive skills tests than kids whose families never lived in poor neighborhoods, unadjusted for any other factor, Sharkey noted, equating cumulative exposure to disadvantaged environments to the equivalent of missing three or four years of school. “This does not mean that kids who score 97 are doomed: they’re scoring close to the national average (of 100).” However, a 9-point differential is larger than the benefits that most interventions can produce. “This is an enormous impact and it’s an impact that’s largest for families who have been exposed to neighborhood poverty, not over a few years, not in a single generation, but over multiple generations of a family,” he said.

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Sharkey’s research on two cohorts of children — one from 1955-70 and another cohort raised 30 years later — finds racial inequality in neighborhood environments has not diminished over time.

Some 62 percent of African Americans in the earlier cohort grew up in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty, compared with about 4 percent of white children. Thirty years later, these gaps persist: 66 percent of African-American children born 1985-2000 live in neighborhoods with at least 20 percent poverty compared to 6 percent of white children.

“This is not a function of income,” he stressed. “If you condition on income, if you run these same figures within income levels, the racial gaps barely change. This is a story of race and neighborhood inequality, not a story of income inequality.”

Neighborhood disadvantages are difficult to overcome, he said, adding that about 64 percent of the advantage or disadvantage a family experiences in one generation typically is passed on to the next — meaning that for a family that starts out in a neighborhood where the average income is about half of the national average, it would take five generations before a family member could expect to live in a neighborhood that’s within 10 percent of the national average.

“This means that for families that are now living in very poor neighborhoods, we can expect them to continue to live in very poor neighborhoods for a century,” Sharkey said. “Neighborhood disadvantages fade away, but they fade away extremely slowly, much more slowly than economic disadvantage,” Sharkey said.

“The children of the rich tend to stay rich, the children of the poor tend to stay poor. But even more than that, the children growing up in poor neighborhoods tend to stay in poor neighborhoods; the children growing up in affluent neighborhoods tend to stay in affluent neighborhoods.”

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“To understand inequality in America, particularly racial inequality, a shift of thinking is necessary: We have to think of inequality as something that occurs not at a point in time in a child’s life, but over generations of family members. It’s something that structures the opportunities and the experience of families in ways that extend over time,” Sharkey said.

“What that means is when we focus on inequality right now, we have to see it as a continuation of inequality that has been experienced over generations of family members. This is a very different perspective on how to view the effects of growing up in a poor neighborhood,” he said.

“It also leads to new perspectives on public policy because it forces policy makers to think not only about the conditions that are experienced right now, not only about the experience of a given child at a point in time, but about the experiences faced by families over multiple generations.”

Sharkey argued that the most important criteria for urban policy lie not in how good the idea is, but rather whether the policy is durable.

“The dominant feature of urban poverty is its continuity and its consistency. I argue that should be the starting point for urban policy,” Sharkey said.

“I’m not advocating any specific programs or interventions. What I’m advocating are a set of principles to apply to those programs. … I don’t care what the idea is, let’s first focus on whether it’s durable, whether it has the capacity to reach multiple generations, whether it has the capacity to be sustained over time,” he said.

“Over and over again we’ve had a cycle when these ideas have been diluted in the political process or have been implemented with great fanfare but not enough funds, or have been implemented for a few years and then abandoned a few years later,” he said.

“Durable urban policy is policy with the capacity to disrupt multigenerational patterns of neighborhood inequality, generate transformative changes in places and in families’ lives and withstand fluctuations in the political mood and the business cycle,” Sharkey said.

Some would argue for confronting urban inequality by expanding opportunities for residential mobility, while others favor making investments in disadvantaged communities rather than moving families out.

“I’m not making a case that we should focus on residential mobility versus investment, or vice versa, I’m making the argument that no matter what policy approach we take, we have to focus on policies that have the capacity to disrupt multigenerational patterns of disadvantage, that have the capacity to be sustained over time.”

Sharkey said he would defer to scholars of social movements, political scientists and community leaders to identify programs that can withstand shifts in the economy and political mood.

“This is where, as a social scientist, my knowledge runs out. This is where community leaders need to figure out a way… to develop the coalitions to create investments that can be sustained over time,” he said. “It’s not a problem of generating ideas — we have good ideas. It’s a problem of generating durable urban policies.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow