It’s never possible to argue with African Americans that if white children were facing the same disturbing facts of life that confront too many African American kids, the entire community would be up in arms.
That is surely the case.
It’s hard to think of a community that has talked as much about children and our good intentions. While we were talking, the well-being of African American children living in persistent poverty has grown worse.
There have been plenty of trouble signs over the years, but there has never been a greater urgency for action than now. While child poverty rates declined in the U.S. in 2016, they went up in Memphis and Shelby County.
And if there are some in the MSA who still think this is a Memphis problem, they should think again. After all, it is the MSA – not Memphis – that ranks #1 for child poverty in the U.S. The higher poverty rates outside Memphis are an aberration when compared to most regions and they result in the Memphis MSA having the highest child poverty ranking for all of the country’s 388 MSAs.
It’s About Parents Too
Often when we talk about turning around the lives of children who are at risk, the conversation turns to education, but in truth, the solutions are about much more than delivering great schools. That’s because the lives of children are multi-dimensional and so must be the solutions.
That’s hard for us, because we have a tendency to chase magic answers and silver bullets or transplant the latest “best practice” from somewhere else. What our children need is a comprehensive plan of action that addresses all parts of their lives.
Only multiple strategies on multiple planes can produce the progress we need – in education, nutrition and healthy lifestyles, cognitive development, after school programs, and much more. After all, they are all links on a chain and one factor is connected to the others.
Often neglected in these discussions about how to improve the futures of every child is that much of it hinges on improving opportunities for their parents and increasing their salaries to a living wage so they have more resources to invest in their children in the form of tutoring, music lessons, arts and cultural events, after school programs, and more.
Measuring The Right Things
The problems that result from the lack of a living wage are compounded by the fact that since 1979, fulltime workers in the bottom tenth in income lost 16.8% of it. While we believe that the PILOT program has long ago evolved from an incentive into an entitlement, we could support additional years of tax freezes if companies agreed to pay living wages to its employees.
It is time for every PILOT to be accompanied by a Community Benefits Agreement that sets out the returns – such as a living wage, support for pubic transit accessibility to the company’s workers, mentoring, and local hiring – pledged by the company to the community whose taxes are being invested in it.
But we digress.
Here’s the thing: we can rhapsodize about the $11 billion in construction that shows signs that our economy – which is one of a handful of cities returning last to pre-Great Recession levels – is finally reviving. Unfortunately, the construction isn’t associated with an influx of new people and companies and too often is a shift of existing companies and employees from one location to another.
We seem to measure progress in terms of construction rather than in terms of new people and new jobs. The focus on construction takes our eyes off the ball when the real measurements of progress are decreases in the poverty rate and with increases in per capita income improving faster than comparable cities.
Intractable Trend Lines
Another measure of success would be better educated, healthier, and happier children. Our recent trend line shows just how high the hill is that we have to climb. Memphis’ child poverty rate in 2011 was 42.1% but by 2016 – as the child poverty rate across the country was dropping – it climbed to 44.7%, which gave the city the second highest child poverty rate for cities with more than 500,000 people.
The decrease from 2014 to 2015 had encouraged us to expect a continued positive trend line for 2016, but it was not to be. The child poverty rates for Memphis from year to year are as follows:
2011 – 42.1 %
2012 – 44.3%
2013 – 45.7%
2014 – 46.9%
2015 – 43.0%
2016 – 44.7%
The poverty rates for the Memphis MSA follow a similar pattern and it is #1 among MSAs with more than one million people for each of the following years:
2011 – 28.9%
2012 – 29.7%
2013 – 30.6%
2014 – 30.8%
2015 – 28.8%
2016 – 30.8%
Translating Good Intentions Into A Good Plan
It is intolerable that deep poverty in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are birthrights to so many children in our community. The depths of persistent poverty often feel third world in nature: 40,000 school children go home to families earning less than $10,000.
These child poverty numbers are the equivalent of a demographic tsunami, but unlike the seismic sea waves, we have had years of warnings to do something about it. They will in time have a seismic effect on Memphis, Shelby County, and the Memphis MSA unless we do something different.
The good news is that there are a number of programs under way in Memphis that have targeted children as their beneficiaries. They are sprinkled all over the city and they are doing God’s work.
There also is research under way that is specifically focusing on children – from pre-K to the effects of toxic shock, from health to juvenile justice, from wrap around social services to interventions that work, and more.
What is lacking from these good intentions is a plan that can disrupt the entrenched child poverty and bring everyone working on solutions into the same room at the same time to develop a comprehensive way forward with short and long-term goals.
Connections
Such a plan should be built on a shared principle: that every child should have a pathway to thrive and prosper as adults.
Children who are persistently poor – living in poverty for more than half of their lives – have significantly lower odds to succeed economically as adults. In the Memphis region, a child raised in the bottom fifth of income has the worst odds of any region in the U.S. in moving to the top fifth. The chance is 2.6%.
Keep in mind that if people of color could earn the same as Caucasians in our region, it would have a $21 billion impact on our GDP.
That brings us full circle. We can’t talk about children without talking about resources for their families, particularly the large percentage of poverty households in Memphis headed by women.
Growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty that are economically segregated drives up the odds against a child’s later success in life. Research suggests that connecting children and their parents to services as early as possible – even before a child is born – can improve the odds for poor children. As a researcher into children and youth issues in Memphis once said to us, “Considering the depth of poverty and its challenges, it’s amazing that as many people have succeeded as they have.”
That too is research worth engaging in. What are the factors, the events, and the pivotal forces that have allowed so many poor African American children to escape when the odds were stacked against them? Perhaps, the answer to that question can provide us with insight that could help us develop paths out of poverty that many more children can follow.
It can begin when all of us say enough is enough, we have no margin for error, and now is the time for action.
***
Join us at the Smart City Memphis Facebook page for daily articles, reports, and commentaries relevant to Memphis and the conversations that begin here.
The problem is that the city of Memphis has such persistent poverty (and crime) that has spread out like a cancer to the entire MSA. You’ve got to solve the problems at the root. The fact that we have such long term, severe poverty has caused our entire region to also have the highest poverty in the entire country. No wonder Memphis has become a national joke and is well known as a city to avoid at all costs. Unfortunately there are no magic answers for a scenario this bad. How many times have we heard calls to action? It just never happens in Memphis and things get worse, not even a little bit better. Reality hurts.
Because of the lack of economic opportunity and access to quality education in black communities, of course poverty and crime exists. The parents of these children are not paid a living wage or even offered decent stable jobs; therefore the children are continuously exposed to inadequate living environments with little opportunity to see life beyond struggle. This cycle has been going on since the abolition of slavery. Blacks were NEVER given the opportunity of economic equality and here we are still in the 21st century still deprived and suffering from systematic and social injustices.
For those of you who live outside of Memphis, why don’t you live in Memphis? Are the schools not good enough? Is your decent, stable, high-paying job along the Poplar corridor or Downtown? When we start seeing the issues of Memphis as our own only then will things change. We have to stop talking about Memphis as if its someone we don’t know. We are Memphis. Memphis doesn’t exists without its people. We are its people.
Anonymous 8:57: As SCM has shown several times, poverty did not spread out from Memphis to region. That did not happen. Unfortunately, counties in region have always had significant poverty rates. That is what makes our region different and why REGION is #1 in country in child poverty and poverty generally.
I’d like to know why Memphis and its surrounding area has so much poverty. Is it because of the Delta region’s historical economy built on cotton and farming? Or is it something more that has caused such abject poverty for decades? Other Deep South big cities like Little Rock, Jackson MS and Birmingham don’t seem to have the same high levels of poverty, infant mortality, poor education and crime as much as Memphis does. The black community here certainly has had the same opportunities found in other cities. Just what exactly has caused the economy in Memphis and the mid south region to fall so far behind everywhere else? What’s in the DNA of Memphis that has caused these horrible conditions?
This region has always had a small number of wealthy landowners and a huge of poor, uneducated, unskilled workers. That continues today with a small group of wealthy executives, an abnormally small middle class, and a huge group of low , poorly educated who live in poverty and rely on public assistance. Memphis made a very bad bet on the warehouse and distribution economy which has exacerbated this class system. Poor and ineffectual leadership (think Crump, Horton, Strickland) have made the situation in Memphis among the worst in the entire country. Status quo.
There are other Southern cities with high poverty rates which were fed by the migration of agricultural workers as more and more of farming was mechanized, but what makes Memphis different is that when you drive out of the core county and into the MSA, the key measurements continue to be bad. Lower per capita income, lower educational attainment, etc. In most cities, when you drive into the MSA, those indicators get better. Compounding problems here is that at the Jobs Conference in 1981, in the midst of an economic downturn, Memphis set priorities that were all anchored in low-wage, low-income industries. It may have provided a short-term boost, but long-term, it has been deadly.
Memphis is a lot more like Mississippi and Arkansas than it is to Tennessee.
The bad decision to continue to base the Memphis region’s economy on low paying warehouse jobs has definitely been deadly. No skills mean no good jobs and no new industries they pay higher wages. This has led to our persistent welfare state making it almost impossible to climb out of this hole.
One way to increase a family’s income is to have fewer kids. Until we can impress upon these single mothers the importance of using birth control and the need to quit having kids you can’t afford, feed, take care of or educate properly the cycle of poverty will never end. Why is it that back in the days of massive segregation, discrimination and poverty we had African American children grow up to become employed and contributing members of the community? Against all odds, these children managed to graduate from school and become employable – something which a large segment of our community is no longer capable of. The breakdown of families and the middle class values (even if they weren’t middle class) they instilled in their children is in my opinion a huge factor in getting us where we are today. This isn’t something the schools or the Police should be expected to do. It needs to be done at the family level, but that is clearly not happening.
I’m confused what this article is about. The headline makes it sound we’re going to read about ways to make a good plan for poor children, but the actual article says nothing about that. Instead, it rattles off data points about poverty and mentions absolutely nothing about making a good plan for poor children. There are some mentions of education here, so why not include the latest educational research and real-world results from schools in high-poverty towns (even those with more poverty than Memphis) that are producing excellent results? Why not write about the towns that are doing things to overcome poverty?
This article sounds like a bunch of excuses re-told ad nauseum for the purpose of making excuses or promoting a political agenda. We all know that poverty is bad — that’s not news to anybody. But, it’s not a death sentence. Tell us how people are being successful at getting out of poverty. That will make your writing more interesting to read. So will following a coherent thesis.