 I wanted to welcome all of you here today to our Dr. Martin Luther King Day program. In a moment I'll ask Sheldon Danziger to come up and give a real introduction to our speakers. But I do want to welcome them personally. Thank you very much for joining us here today. Today's event is co-sponsored by the National Poverty Center, which has been housed at the Ford School since 2002. And as I think everybody in this room knows, it's really internationally recognized for its research on causes and consequences of poverty and evaluation of anti-poverty programs. Our panel today is also sponsored by one of the Ford School's most active student groups. That's the Students of Color in Public Policy. And I'd like to thank all of the members of SKIP for co-sponsoring our MLK Day event today and helping to encourage all of the students to join us and to participate. As I mentioned, in just a moment Sheldon Danziger will be speaking and giving a full introduction to our panelists. He's the co-director of the National Poverty Center and the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy. In 1989, Sheldon founded the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. And it's a program that has supported doctoral students and post-docs who are members of traditionally underrepresented groups. Early in their career, both Mary and Sandra participated in that program and that makes it especially delightful for us to welcome them back with us here today. They, as you'll hear, have gone on to do so many interesting things that we're looking forward to hearing about. And so I thank you for coming out on such a very cold day to join us for what I anticipate will be a very interesting, lively, active discussion. Again, welcome to the Ford School. And with that, perhaps I would like to welcome Sheldon Danziger to the podium. Thank you, Susan. I'm going to introduce all three of the program participants today. And then each will speak and then we'll have time for question and answers at the end. And that will be followed by a reception and a book signing. There are copies of books by our speakers today, and I'll mention the books when I introduce them for sale afterwards, and they'll even autograph the books for you. As Susan mentioned, for a faculty member and mentor of postdoctoral fellows, the greatest reward is seeing your former mentees excel. And that certainly is the case with both Mary Patillo and Sandra Smith. The quite remarkable thing is that both were undergraduates at Columbia University. Both were doctoral students at the University of Chicago working with William Julius Wilson and others. And after Chicago, both were postdoctoral fellows here at the University of Michigan. Mary Patillo is now Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She's also a faculty associate in the Institute for Policy Research. Mary's first book, Black Picket Fences, Privilege in Peril Among the Black Middle Class, was something she worked on while she was a postdoctoral fellow here. It won a number of prizes, including the Oliver Cromwell Cox Best Award from the American Sociological Association. And today she'll be talking about her most recent book, Black on the Block, The Politics of Race and Class in the City. In addition to her academic work and chairing her department, Mary is a founding board member of the Urban Prep Charter Academy for Young Men in Chicago. So Mary is an example of an academic who's venturing out into the real world. And I wish her the best of luck on that because I think that's a lot harder than writing prize-winning academic books. Our second speaker is Sandra Smith, who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California Berkeley. I don't want to jinx things, but her department and college have put her up for tenure, so I think the next time we see her, she'll be an associate professor of sociology. She previously taught at New York University, was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and next year will be a visiting scholar at Stanford Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her new book is Loan Pursuit, Distrust in Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor. And this was a project she started while she was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan, and the study respondents were interviewed. They live in Southeast Michigan. After Mary and Sandra talk about their books, David Harding is going to be a discussant. David is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. He's the co-author of a book, The Social Roots of School Shooting, and the author of a new book in progress, Living the Drama, Why Neighborhoods Matter for Inner City Boys. With that, I'm going to sit down and turn it over to Mary, and somebody will tell you how to turn on the screen. Great, thank you. So thank you all for coming, and the joy of coming back to where you did some work is another opportunity to say thank you. So I really thank you, Sheldon, for the support that I had while being here, and for many other people that I see here who were here when I was here or other friends and colleagues. It really is great to be back in this beautiful new home. It's a new home from when I was here, but it really is great to be back, so thank you, Sheldon. In 1966, Martin Luther King came to Chicago, bringing the Civil Rights Movement north. Chicago was the new battleground, and after strategizing with local leaders in Chicago, they decided that the strategy or what they would focus on in Chicago was what was called an end slums campaign. That's a button on the left from the end slums campaign in Chicago in 1966. King moved into a rundown apartment building on the west side of Chicago, and he drew attention to the conditions in poor black neighborhoods in Chicago and thus to poor black neighborhoods in northern cities overall. Soon he was leading thousands of people in marches through white communities, drawing attention to the severe racial discrimination and racism that existed in the north. After one such march, King remarked, quote, I have seen many demonstrations in the south, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today. The campaign in Chicago had mixed results with some promises from the daily administration, the mayor at that time, many of those promises weren't kept, and concessions from local businesses to invest in black institutions. But in 1968, when King was assassinated, Chicago's black communities erupted in outrage, and the scars remain visible even today. That's a photograph of one of the business districts on the west side right after the riots in 1968, and many of the commercial strips especially on the west side remain relatively disinvested and underutilized today. So this talk is about the government's end slums campaigns of today, or the end slums policy strategies of today, or at least one major component of the kinds of approaches that policy, the kinds of approaches toward central city neighborhoods. And in particular, I'll be talking about the demolition of public housing and its replacement with what's the mantra in the policy world and housing, mixed income communities. So first let me set the national context. It's no surprise that there is a housing crisis. Much of the housing crisis is right now being discussed in terms of the mortgage crisis, but there is of course a housing crisis around affordable housing. And these are, this is figures from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, on the percentage of people with housing problems, and the percentage of people who lack health insurance, and the percentage of people who are food insecure. And I show this because of course, especially universal health insurance is really on our radar screen, as our politicians are always talking about universal health insurance, but housing is not really on our radar screen in terms of things that are important as policy initiatives, but yet 35% of Americans experience some kind of housing problem, whether that be overcrowding or substandard conditions, or what is called being cost burdened or paying more than 30% of your income towards rent. And you see that's particularly acute in the left, or your right hand slide, particularly acute for families earning under $25,000, where nearly 70% of families are experiencing some kind of housing problem. So this gives you a sense of the magnitude and the importance of housing issues, even though it's not really on our national radar screen. This is just one more way to look at it. I don't know if you can see those numbers, but the darker the shading, the more minimum wage jobs you need to afford a fair market rent two bedroom apartment in those places. So the darkest shaded places are places where you need three minimum, more than three minimum wage jobs to afford a fair market rent two bedroom, and the mid gray are where you need two to three jobs, and the few places that are like Michigan that are not mid shaded are places that you need fewer than two jobs. Michigan's right there on two, but still you need two minimum wage jobs to afford a fair market rent two bedroom apartment, again to give you a sense of the housing crisis. But in the middle of this housing crisis, middle class households are a hot commodity. They're touted by policy makers and urban planners as necessary participants in curing the ills of public housing and the plague of urban poverty more generally. After population growth, the most frequent indicator of the health of a city is its per capita income or its median family income, the higher the better. Rich households are even better than middle class ones. So this is just an example of how Money Magazine decides on its best places to live and how they eliminate cities, they can't be the best places to live, that have low education scores, high crime rates, absurdly high housing costs, decline in employment or low or income less than 90% of state median. In many respects, these are pulling in opposite directions because absurdly high housing costs are often the places where higher income people live, but not wanting low income people in the cities kind of pulls in two different directions. Middle class residents and the affluent even more raise property values and thus property tax revenue. They consume more and thus contribute to higher sales tax revenue. They attract businesses that also pay taxes. They fund the coffers of political campaigns and they demand less in the way of costly social services. Using the same logic then, poverty is a drag on cities. The lower the proportion of poor people, the better. So urban poverty rates can be lowered in three ways. First, you can help poor people or poor city residents get out of poverty, so you're decreasing the number of poor people by making poor people not poor. You can increase the numbers of non-poor people in cities by luring them from elsewhere. We often call that gentrification. Or you can decrease the number of poor people by sending them somewhere else. And this is what's been done through some demonstration programs like moving to opportunity where public housing residents are encouraged to move to low-poverty neighborhoods outside of central cities. Public housing policy in particular and efforts at urban revitalization more generally engage all three of these strategies for sure. But I'm going to be talking mostly about strategies number two and three, which are often touted as routes to strategy number one. So the idea is if you can move people out of poor neighborhoods, that is the strategy toward helping poor people not be poor anymore. There are many critiques of that, but I'll mostly be talking about strategies two and three. Of course, anti-poverty policy of this sort that's kind of urban focused will have decidedly racial contours. Since the poverty rate among blacks is about twice as high, three times as high as that of whites. And of course the concentration of black poverty is much greater than the concentration of white poverty. So this is in Chicago the percentage of blacks, Asians, non-Hispanic, whites and Hispanics who live in high-poverty neighborhoods or neighborhoods that are above 20% poor. And you see the concentration of poverty is much more pronounced with 40, almost half of all African-Americans in Chicago living in neighborhoods that are more than 20% poor. So basically what this illustrates is the racial contours of concentrated poverty and the fact that those kinds of place-based anti-poverty strategies that either move poor people out of poor neighborhoods or bring non-poor people into poor neighborhoods will disproportionately affect black neighborhoods because of the greater concentration of poverty among African-Americans. In the 1950s, when people were leaving cities for the suburbs, urban renewal was proffered as the way to stop the bleeding of the middle classes. Today we don't use the term urban renewal, but the strategy isn't that much different. So the strategy that kind of is the centerpiece of the federal housing policy that I'll be talking about is called HOPE 6. It aims to quote, lessen concentrations of poverty by placing public housing in non-poverty neighborhoods and promoting mixed income communities. 239 HOPE 6 revitalization grants have been granted during that time. And under HOPE 6, over 100,000 units of public housing will be demolished across the country. So again, I want you to think about that number in light of the housing crunch that I started with in the beginning. Here we have a serious crisis in terms of the availability of affordable housing, but yet there is this massive demolition of public housing, public housing that's been deemed severely distressed, and in those public housing projects where these units will be demolished, only about half will come back online as public housing. So they'll be, again, located within these mixed income communities and in these places there'll be about a half decrease in the availability of affordable housing. So there are many justifications for these mixed income policies and perhaps kind of foundationally was the work of William Julius Wilson, who posited that high levels of neighborhood poverty had negative consequences for residents above and beyond their individual poverty. Wilson and others initiated a research industry to uncover and describe what were called concentration effects. Wilson argued that quote, the declining presence of working in middle class blacks also deprives ghetto neighborhoods of key resources, including structural resources such as residents with income to sustain neighborhood services and cultural resources such as conventional role models for neighborhood children. So while Wilson lobbied most forcefully for labor market and safety net reforms, he made a brief mention of this quote I have here, the quote reintegration of the neighborhood with working in middle class blacks and black professionals as one possible strategy. Again, his emphasis was more on labor market strategies, but he made this reference in the text. However, he was not all that hopeful about this strategy. He called it the so-called self-help programs to revitalize the inner city. And he was surprised when these mixed income projects or this mixed income mantra came to the fore that they quote, received so much serious attention from the media and policymakers. So given Wilson's own distancing from such a strategy, it's curious that policymakers have latched on to this research as the scientific basis for policies that emphasize class integration. On second inspection, however, the embrace of the mixed income route makes sense because it's consonant with urban elites' interests in recapturing the middle class for the city's tax base. Whereas Wilson's other proposals, such as creating a tight labor market, extensive and expensive job training, more generous and universal welfare benefits and pro-union legislation are all not aligned with urban elites' interests around bringing in a greater tax base. So mixed income communities as curious to urban poverty represent a decidedly non-structural policy intervention, relying on the prospect of cross-class affiliation to combat the existing forces of systemic stratification. The increased municipal revenue that comes with the influx of middle class residents could in theory equalize the structural landscape by funding things like high quality public preschools, wage increases for civil servant employees, or investments in public transportation. But in practice, such a redistribution of resources often takes a back seat to feeding the demands of the new gentry for things like more public art, smoother streets, and support for more high-end housing, recreational, and commercial activities. I wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune where I counterposed Mayor Daley's beautification of the downtown area, and goodness knows, as I said in the op-ed, I love to drive on Lakeshore Drive and see all the pretty plantings. It's a beautifully landscaped city, but I don't want to do that at the expense of the demolition of public housing. Because both public sector and the private market cater to the coveted middle class citizen-consumer, the underlying structures of inequality are left intact, even if the neighborhoods look better. Finally, if gentrification is the point at which mixed income communities tip upward, then whatever structural reforms had been enacted, better schools or more jobs or a cleaner environment, now disproportionately benefit the incoming gentry rather than the outgoing poor residents. In this formulation, the mixed income approach is not simply non-structural in its ideological foundations, but anti-structural, reinforcing and replicating a system of haves and have-nots, this time with government support. So those were my kind of sociological critiques of mixed income communities, and these are my more, these are the critiques coming from my own particular research on this topic. So I argue that the popular mixed income approach has four important weaknesses. First of all, it plans for racial integration, but underestimates the tenacity of racial segregation. Second, it ignores the mixed income reality of many black neighborhoods, even though those neighborhoods don't seem to fully benefit from that reality. Third, it resigns itself to and reinforces the unjust status quo, whereby poor neighborhoods don't get public investments and middle class neighborhoods do. And fourth, and this is the one I'll expand upon most in this research, it promotes a quote when I'm calling a tyranny of the middle class. In sum, instead of making needed public and private investments in poor and black residents and neighborhoods as and where they are, mixed income strategies suggest that the people will benefit more if they simply move to greener pastures and that the neighborhoods are only eligible for such investments if middle class people move in them. Both scenarios dismiss the as is worthiness of poor and black residents and neighborhoods. So let me briefly expand on the first three critiques and then I'll say a little bit more about the fourth. First, moving poor and black families into non-poor and predominantly white areas has garnered sufficient resistance from white homeowners and communities that it has been possible only on a small scale. This just gives you a sense in Chicago where we are demolishing public housing and residents are moving with housing choice vouchers. It used to be called Section 8 vouchers where you can move into the private rental market. In Chicago, 72% of movers with these vouchers moved to neighborhoods that were over 90% African American. Despite the fact that over half of them, when surveyed, said that they would like to live in a neighborhood where there is a mix of African American, Hispanic, and white residents. So while the preference seemed to be for integrated living, the outcome seemed to be more repeated segregated living partially because of steering of some of the housing choice counselors as well as just the availability of apartments, the reception by landlords. There's a lot of research on this particular topic on the resegregation of people with vouchers, of African Americans with vouchers and their disproportionate clustering into similarly African American and only somewhat less poor neighborhoods. So this idea about moving poor people from poor neighborhoods out into other neighborhoods underestimates the tenacity of racial segregation. The second critique is that many black neighborhoods are mixed income, not by design, but because of the combination of racial segregation and disproportionate black poverty. So my first book, Black Picket Fences, was on this topic. It was about a black, lower middle class neighborhood that was mixed income just because it had a somewhat weaker housing market and thus allowed lower income families to move in and it had middle class families who had been there for a number of years and it kind of created this organic mixed income community to begin with. This is a map of Chicago by race. The bluer areas are African American and the non-shaded areas are white and the dots are the location of grocery stores by race in Chicago. And what you see is in this large swath of the black south side, which is class heterogeneous. So while this area here might be predominantly poor, these neighborhoods here are more lower middle class, middle class, and some of them are even somewhat affluent. And you still see the dearth of grocery stores as compared to the middle class white neighborhoods along the North Lakefront. So this is just to give you a sense of even that mixed income black neighborhoods that clearly do not create a panacea for these black neighborhoods just because they're mixed income. There remains a disinvestment. I could do this map for a number of things. Mortgage dollars invested or probably even municipal dollars invested and it shows you that mixed income is not the only answer, that there remains a discriminatory effect for predominantly black neighborhoods even if they are mixed income. The third critique is that mixed income strategy is resigned to the unjust status quo. One rationale for mixed income communities is that the political and economic clout of middle class newcomers will benefit their poor neighbors through increased public services and commercial investment for the whole neighborhood. This assumption illustrates that mixed income approaches are resigned to the unjust status quo in which poor and black neighborhoods are not worthy of public and private investments on their own. Instead, they have to be able to attract middle income folks. While one cannot help but acknowledge the positive changes that accompany new middle class residents assuming that they are necessary for such changes buys into the disenfranchisement of poor families. Our only neighborhoods with middle class citizens entitled to working street lights, respective and effective policing, attractive parks and affordable preschool. When the question is posed in that manner it becomes clear that the logic behind mixed income communities is actually backwards. When poor families with few resources are clustered in neighborhoods they have a greater need for such state-funded goods than concentrations of more affluent families do. Theoretically, once the middle class moves in, the state should be able to move out. And this gives you a sense, there I'm talking about the state, here I'm talking about the private sector where many people might say, okay well the state should move in but we understand the private sector is going where the disposable income is. So if the private sector is not in black or poor neighborhoods then we can understand why that's the fact. Well this gives you a sense of the leakage, what's called the disposable income leakage from black neighborhoods because of the dearth of commercial investments in them. So in this particular neighborhood, in the Kenwood neighborhood, there's a leakage of almost $200 million a year because of the lack of commercial investment in poor black neighborhoods. Okay so my final critique which I'll give some data from my book is based on this idea that mixed income scenarios promote a tyranny of the middle class. Married stories of negotiation, conflict, resistance, and displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods illuminate the middle class biases that prevail when the incomes mix. Middle class desires for trendy boutiques and upscale restaurants went out over pawn shops and ethnic food stores. Their affinity for dog parks and alley and garage parking curtails usage of those spaces by children and their fear of young black and Latino men prompts the police to sweep them from the street corners. The middle class is coveted not just for its money but for its saving graces. Even when poor families have a new grocery store at which to shop, a new bank in which to begin saving, new neighbors to give them job information, and a safer street on which to walk, the new community is not always a friendly place to them because one of the underlying assumptions of mixed income approaches is that poor people's behaviors need to be modified and or controlled. So this gives you a sense of some of the assumptions behind these mixed income approaches that I argue denigrate the social networks that poor people have already and Sandra will be talking about some of those social networks and in fact some people are arguing now that the mixed income communities actually don't have it right because of the mismatch in the kinds of jobs that professionals have access to and that low income folks are looking for, there's a mismatch between the kind of job information that the higher income folks in the mixed income community might have and the kind of jobs that the low income people might need. There's always this assumption about social control and that the higher income people will act as purveyors of order and strong management and this idea of role modeling. So two examples give some insight on how mixed income strategies may not exclude the poor per se, but are clear that their success relies on the exclusion of the poorly behaved. So the neighborhood that I studied is North Kenwood Oakland, it's in Chicago, it's on the south side just north of Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is and about 10 minutes south of downtown, abutting Lake Michigan on the east and so you can see the inset over there. In 2004 when North Kenwood Oakland was in full stride with the construction of housing across the neighborhood, a task force of residents was convened to decide on the future for this neighborhood and the mission was to quote, to plan for a quote safe and harmonious mixed income community with affordable housing for all families and an aesthetic and functional physical environment. So one of the, just trust me, the neighborhood's gentrifying, the income's going up, the poverty rate's going down, the housing prices are going up, there we go. At one meeting of the task force, a resident made a suggestion for how to improve the physical environment. Her idea was to focus on one of the main thoroughfares, Drexel Boulevard. This is a photograph of Drexel Boulevard in the late 1890s. As this idea took off, task force members imagined an inviting, active space. They would add decorative benches, garbage cans, flower pots, and repave the cracked and buckled path that wound through the parkway. They would invite a competition of artists to make some of these things, benches and garbage cans and so on. In essence they would return Drexel Boulevard to the grandeur it enjoyed in the late 19th century when it was quote, one of the preeminent addresses in the old suburb of Hyde Park. Into this discussion, a local police officer, a member of the task force who represented the first emphasis on a safe community offered the following quote. When we're thinking about working on Drexel Boulevard, we should really think about discouraging some of the current uses there because people are out there barbecuing and setting up tents, selling snow cones and drinking and just doing all kinds of things. People seem to think of it as a park and they just come out and plant themselves. I would like to see a larger contingency of residents use the parkway. I've heard complaints from many people that they're afraid to go out and use it because some of the people there. So we want to think about that as we plan. A number of suggestions flowed in support of this comment such as making the benches uncomfortable, issuing citations for unlicensed vendors or designating a specific area of the parkway for barbecuing. I was also a member of this task force. In response to this line of brainstorming, I raised the concern that our ideas might contradict the second goal of the task force, which was to build a harmonious community. These various deterrent strategies might alienate and anger the people who enjoyed the parkway as it is, as was this particular family who was having a birthday barbeque out quite fortuitously for my purposes, given the comments I had heard at the community meeting. But I was told that the parkway was not harmonious because only a small minority of residents used it. And if the complaints received by the police department were the best indication, the ways in which that small minority used the parkway closed off its use by other residents. I asked, is barbecuing there illegal? And the police officer said that it wasn't. She looked for the right words to describe what was going on there. She tried loitering, and loitering, of course, is illegal. And I said, well, loitering, you know, was that really? What was the problem? And of course, socializing in the parkway was exactly what the parkway was meant for. So I didn't want to make my point too forcefully. I'm a participant observer, so I participated, and I decided I had to observe. And I turned my attention to observing and observed the conversation drift toward turning Drexel Parkway into a completely passive decorative space with large flower arrangements and sculptures, with no walkway and no benches. I also observed that none of the people whose use of Drexel Parkway, like this family, none of those people were at this community meeting. The participation in many community meetings was disproportionately homeowners and newcomers to the neighborhood. Homeowners have yards and decks on which to socialize and barbecue. They don't need Drexel Boulevard for such purposes and are fine with admiring the parkway as they drive along it and look at the pretty plantings. This exercise in how to manage public space in a mixed income neighborhood foregrounds the way in which the face-off of home-owning middle-class recent revivals against people who play their music in public areas, socializing groups or barbecue in parks can both be rhetorically disdainful and substantively hostile. Working-class and poor residents suffer as their behaviors are delimited by the desires of middle-class newcomers. So I have a second example, but I don't want to take up too much of Sandra's time, so maybe I'll wait for that in the Q&A. It's about actual displacement of rental families who rent in the neighborhood through increases in security deposits and general harassment of young people who might be using the courtyards of public buildings, but I'll say that. So in both of these examples, this is the point at which the benefits of gentrification, which is a type of income mixing for a time, and this neighborhood also has the traditional Hope 6 projects that I've been talking about, that these benefits of mixed-income housing do not flow equally, and established poor residents feel and indeed are increasingly supervised and disciplined so that the new residents can fully enjoy the neighborhood as they desire. Such middle-class tyranny denies the possessions, rights, and humanity of poor residents. An alternative to these scenarios that privilege the middle class is to instead encourage and require greater tolerance on the latter's part. Most programs that move poor families to non-poor neighborhoods or place poor families in these new mixed-income communities have some kind of training for low-income families. They have to go through good neighbor housekeeping training, the public housing families who moved into mixed-income communities. This underscores the belief that poor families are inherently in need of some kind of behavioral reformation. They are taught how to be good neighbors in this new environment, but the same kind of training is provided to or required of middle-income families, assuming that by dint of their economic success, they must just know how to act. But since this is social engineering of a sort, perhaps nothing should be taken for granted. In particular, mixed-income developments have the opportunity to broaden the horizons of middle-class folks. If training programs cannot fully convince them of the comforts of sitting on the stoop or the likely harmlessness of loud cursing teenagers, which they themselves might have been at one time, have multi-generational households or the sociability of barbecuing in the park rather than sitting on their back decks, then at the very least, they might increase respect and tolerance for such choices and arrangements. This is a photograph of the demolition of the public housing in North Kenwood, Oakland. There will be 120 public housing units built on this site where there were 700 units demolished. So you see the decline in the public housing on this site. And this is, again, a visual representation of contemporary and slums campaign. For most players in the public policy and planning world, neighborhood revitalization is synonymous with attracting middle-class newcomers. The most aggressive of these kinds of programs is the transformation of public housing. Most approaches to new and poor neighborhoods and public housing projects begin with this premise that higher-income residents are the most important ingredient for a healthy neighborhood. This commentary, however, has tried to bring to light the biases inherent in such an approach, and the people and places it leaves behind. These critiques are not meant to imply that mixed-income approaches are all bad or that they have no value or that they should be suspended in favor of direct investments in poor neighborhoods. I think there is a place for these kinds of programs. Rather, it's a call for policymakers to treat poor and black communities fairly as a focus for advocacy, as places that are already mixed-income and still under-resourced, as places that absorb about-your-holding families who do not make these mobility moves, and as places with functional social networks, rational modes of behavior, and respectable modes of moral codes that deserve consideration and nurturing rather than wanton dismantling and transformation. And I'll stop there and turn it over to Sandra. Good afternoon. Like Mary, I'd like to thank Sheldon and the National Poverty Center for the invitation to come out to you in some ways. You can do a lot and get acknowledged by your peers, but when you get invited to come back home and this feels like home to me in so many ways, certainly my intellectual home away from home and in a number of ways these people feel like my family here, it makes me feel really good to be back and to be able to share my work after publication. So I, too, would like to thank Sheldon. You know how much I appreciate you and care about this community. So here we go. So how do we explain persistent black joblessness? Engaged most urban poverty scholars on this issue, and you'll likely be met with one or more of the following explanations. One, due to the changing structure of urban economies, there has been a dramatic loss of good-paying jobs for lesser-skilled workers, and this loss has had a disproportionately negative effect on black inner-city workers. Two, despite claims to the contrary, race is still one of the most important factors affecting blacks' life chances as evidence from audit studies on employer discrimination has shown. And this has had the most profound effect on black ex-offenders. Three, embedded in subcultures of defeatism and resistance, the black poor do not value work as a productive enterprise and so have endless excuses for why they cannot find and keep work. Four, the black poor, especially residents of neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage, are socially isolated from mainstream ties who can inform them about job opportunities, and so they don't find out about these opportunities even when job opportunities increase. And more recently, I think that there's been discussion about multiple barriers to employment, largely driven by research that's focused on the effect of welfare reforms. And here, the black poor often have multiple barriers to employment that make finding and keeping work rather difficult. So while these theses do not exhaust the list of explanations offered, they do represent those intellectual discourses that are most often deployed regarding persistent black joblessness. So in lone pursuit, I contend that although each of these theoretical frames is compelling and each has wide appeal, we cannot draw from these singly or incombination in order to come to a complete understanding of persistent black joblessness. This is because with very few exceptions, none of these perspectives examines the process of finding work in ethnographic detail, engaging the black poor in in-depth interviews about the process of finding work that they undertake. Two negative consequences for understanding persistent joblessness result from neglecting this approach and the assumptions that underlie it. The first has to do with meaning making. Structural accounts of black joblessness, although profoundly insightful, often fail to consider the extent to which the black poor actually understand their experiences or circumstances as such. To the extent that researchers do consider this, they largely assume that the black poor do understand that their employment problems are largely rooted in structural constraints. Proponents of the cultural deficiency perspective do not ignore the meanings that the black poor attribute to their labor market experiences. Instead, they critically misstate them, arguing that the black poor do not work because they either do not believe that they can handle the difficulties associated with finding and keeping work, or they find morally repulsive the opportunities to which they have access. The black poor, however, neither see structural factors as most pressing, nor are they motivated by subcultures of defeatism or resistance. Instead, they largely explain persistent joblessness as a result, as a failure on the part of individuals to uplift themselves. Although employer discrimination and the changing structure of the urban economy have had the most profound effects on the employment of the black poor, prior survey research suggests that among the black poor, structural factors such as discrimination and job loss do not register as major impediments to achieving their goals, but deficient motivation and individual effort do. Thus, even while acknowledging the prevalence of discrimination and other structural constraints, poor blacks nonetheless largely conclude that hard work and individual resolve are most essential for black's achievement. My own respondents, 103 young low-income black men and women from southeast Michigan were no different in this regard. The majority indicated that finding a job was not difficult at all because jobs were readily available. To the extent that jobs were not in abundance, those with perseverance would nevertheless prevail because any job seeker with motivation and drive could find one. Those who could not were simply not looking, and so joblessness indicated a weakness of character, a failure on the part of individuals to fight for what they wanted. Furthermore, with an abundance of programs and services available to aid the poor's transition to employment, my respondents argued that the jobless had no credible defense for the persistent joblessness. So by failing to examine closely the process of finding work, proponents of these perspectives have neglected or misstated the meanings that the black poor attribute to their circumstances of employment, meanings that affect their actions in the economic realm and impact their employment outcomes above and beyond the structural factors that also constrain them. And these views had consequences for how the black poor job seekers and job holders engaged each other during the process of finding work. Given the explanations for joblessness that the black poor most often deploy, tensions and conflicts pervade into personal relations between these two sets of actors, infusing their relations with distrust and provoking uncooperativeness. So this leads to one of the key sets of findings that I report in Loan Pursuit. Although most of my respondents saw value in using personal contacts to find work, when actually in a position to assist with job information or influence, job holders were not so enthusiastic or optimistic. Indeed, reluctant personal contacts, that is job holders who usually chose not to assist or who limited the assistance they did provide, they were in the majority in my sample, unconstituting some six and 10 job holders. When queried about their reluctance, these job holders raised three concerns. 20% had come to believe that those without jobs lacked the motivation and determination to follow through on offers of assistance. 10% expressed concern that their referrals were too needy and that by taking part, by taking on job finding obligations, they would become responsible not only for job getting, but for helping their referrals stay employed. Thus compelling or compounding the stresses in their already overburdened lives. And most importantly, 70% of these job holders feared that once hired, the job seekers that they helped would act irresponsibly on the job and thus would compromise job holders' reputations and labor market stability. In all, 80% of my respondents, reluctant personal contacts expressed one or more of these concerns, perceiving job seekers as too risky and perhaps too undeserving to trust with assistance. The job holders' perceptions of untrustworthiness were not without consequence. In all, 71% of those who expressed one or more of these issues, these concerns were reluctant to provide job finding assistance. Just 17% of job holders who didn't express any of these concerns were reluctant to assist. So given the extent to which concerns about motivation, neediness, and irresponsibility shape job holders' perceptions of risk and effected their willingness to assist, it's any wonder that they assisted at all. But they did. Some 87% had helped some body, some family members, friends, acquaintances, even strangers in some instances in the past to find work. However, this extent in nature of assistance depended on a number of key factors, including job holders' own reputations with their employers, the strength of the relationship between job seekers and job holders, and most importantly, job holders' assessment of job seekers' reputation. Indeed, 75% of my respondents reported that when in possession of job information and influence, they largely based their decisions on what they knew about job seekers' prior actions and behaviors, both on the job and in their personal lives. These signaled to job holders the likelihood that job seekers would act responsibly throughout the employment process with particular interest in whether or not these job seekers would do anything to negatively affect their job holders' own reputations. Respondents like Shirley Wyatt, for instance, focused on job seekers' work reputations. The 27-year-old unemployed single mother, Four, explained, if I know what type of person they is, if I know whether they actually are going to get the job and stay at the job, or they're one of them people that, you know, I know after the first two little paychecks, they're going to be quitting, ain't even no need for me to be telling you because you ain't going to be staying there. This was also how Cynthia Wilson made sense of whether or not to assist her brother. Because of his past behavior in the labor market, she was skeptical that he would be consistent and dependable if she were to facilitate his hire at her job. At the time, she worked full-time at a calling card company making $9 an hour and learning computer skills. She explained, first of all, figure out what type of work history they already have. You know, versus someone like my brother, for instance, he wanted to get a job. I'm like, no, because you jumped from job to job to job. Can't do that. Well, he finally found a job that he liked. He's been there, I think, for two years now. Now, if he came to me and said, well, Cynthia is your employer hiring, no problem, no problem. So even though her job-seeking relation was her brother, with whom we can assume she presumably had a long history, the strength and nature... Oh, maybe not always, you know. Lots of step families. So the strength and nature of their relationship was somewhat inconsequential, right? Instead, the history of his behavior on the job is what interested Cynthia the most, providing her with information from which to deduce her brother's future conduct. Once he repaired his reputation by working steadily with one employer, Cynthia was more than willing to provide assistance. So 38% of my respondents, like Shirley and Cynthia, considered job seekers' work reputations when deciding whether or not to assist. Like employers, they were concerned with whether or not job seekers had been stably employed, the circumstances under which they left their last job, the frequency with which they moved from one job to the next, and how they typically behaved at work. As one respond proclaimed, you're doing the same thing the employer would do, like a reference check. The 43% of my job holders considered how job seekers carried themselves outside of the employment arena when deciding whether or not to assist. A special concern were those respondents described as real ghetto. These individuals, these were individuals whose behavior included being loud and raucous, abusing illicit drugs and alcohol, and taking part in criminal behavior such as robbing and stealing, because such inclinations would almost certainly destroy job holders' reputations. So in the form of drug and alcohol abuse and robbing and stealing, ghetto behavior was little tolerated. As Cynthia Wilson again explained in reference to another job seeking friend, Cornelia, she was like real ghetto, you know? She was heavy off into drugs, and I was like, I don't think so. You're not going to make me look bad. Each time Cornelia would inquire about job openings at her place of employment, to save face, Cynthia would lie. She recounted, I just said they're not hiring every time. I know one point in time they got to be hiring, but I was like, they're not hiring, and then she starts to laugh, and then she yells, it's a freeze, like a job freeze. Since that time, Cynthia and Cornelia have become best friends, and Cornelia now knows that Cynthia misled her about the job opportunities. However, Cynthia still refuses to assist her friend who has yet to overcome her addiction. In situations where job holders were embedded in networks of relations in which a number of people had problematic reputations, the thought of providing job finding assistance caused great concern. This was Robert Randolph's issue. Robert was a 32 year old unmarried and unemployed father of three. When asked how he determined whether or not to assist, he explained, you know, because I know a lot of people that smoke rocks, which would be crack, you know, and do drugs, and not really serious about getting out here for a job, those are the people that, you know, I would say, well, there's a person out there that may have something for you, you know, you go talk to. I would put him in contact with somebody, you know, but wouldn't put my name out there and recommend him, you know, I wouldn't do that, no. Since so many of his friends, his own friends regularly committed theft and larceny, Monroe Lashley expressed similar concerns. Monroe was a 35 year old single father of three, and he said, I got friends, you know, that's thieves, that wanna rob and steal, you know what I'm saying? How would I be like trying to get them a job where I'm working at? Then the boss's car come up missing or something, or, you know, computer come up missing. In situations like these, the prospect of providing assistance was inherently risky. Because so many of their friends, family members and acquaintances were known to be of such ill repute that job holders felt that they could not trust them to behave appropriately. Job holders had a greater range of responses toward job seekers known for their raucous ghetto behavior. Some, like Henry Wilson, found ghetto behavior offensive at all times, a sure sign that the offender did not share their values and attitudes and thus could not be counted on to represent them well on the job. Similarly, Gary Hansen, a 31 year old unemployed father of seven, expressed concern about how job seekers would represent him explaining if they would be the type of person to say something like oh man, fuck that bitch, man. That's not the person I would want to put my name on the line for. Statements such as the one Gary quoted while far from innocuous. In the context of a private conversation might be interpreted as such. However, for job holders making decisions about whom to trust with their names and reputations in the labor market, statements such as these are a sure sign to job holders of job seekers vulgarity and borishness. Attributes that job holders don't want and this was of no small consequence for Gary. He had once assisted a good friend only to have that person be fired for frequent absences, cursing and intimidating others on the job. As Gary understood it, he brought the street to the job, and you just don't bring the street to the job. That's a total separation. While they have remained friends, Gary would not contemplate assisting this friend again. Other job holders were only offended by raucous behavior when the individuals they were connected to seemed oblivious to context. For these job holders acting ghetto itself was not to be scorned. Indeed, when socializing with Kith and Kin it was actually quite enjoyable. Problems would arise however when individuals did not take their context into consideration. Job seekers inability to discern the proper context for acting ghetto was the primary reason Brenda Bowen gave for refusing assistance. A 36 year old separated an unemployed mother and Brenda explained, I hate to be judgmental, but I look at the way this person is reacting. If you can't control yourself in public no matter that you're not in the job you're out in public. These are the people that you really don't know and they're judging you. The only thing they can judge you by is what they see. You don't know how to act. You're speaking ignorant because I've been around people like that. Say for instance, I don't know you with this girl and she's just cussing and just saying all sorts of ignorant things. I might say it, but when you're walking past I'll stop. So like Cynthia Wilson, Brenda often lied to job seeking friends and relatives like the one she just described about job openings at her place of employment. Job holders paid so much attention to the reputations of their job seeking ties because of the potential damage job seekers might do to their reputations. The interaction between the two job holders and job seekers reputations that seem to matter most in their determinations. What was noteworthy from my data was that job holders with stellar reputations on the job were generally open to providing job finding assistance while those who had tarnished reputations in the eyes of their employers were patently against providing assistance. What was striking however were the narratives that were provided by job seekers like Jackie York or Jeremy Jessup. Both began providing referrals in good standing with their employers, but as because they and because they were held in high regard initially, they were willing to influence the hires of job seekers with questionable reputations, but as these hires failed to work out both of their reputations became tarnished and they became increasingly reluctant to recommend any of their friends for jobs that were deemed a process inherently risky. Jackie eventually lost the confidence of her employer, Jeremy lost his job by helping friends who didn't work out. As a result of outcomes like these both job seekers and job holders reputations dominated job holders concerns about whether or not to assist. So instead of assisting then these job holders literally ranted about the value of self-reliance of individualism to the job search process. So this leads me to my second set of key findings and that is that job holders calls for personal responsibility and self-sufficiency were not without consequence. Instead they had a profound effect on the job search strategies that job seekers deployed. Although roughly 90% of my job seekers had mobilized friends and relatives for help in finding work at some point in the past and although about half of them had found their current or most recent job through a personal contact a significant minority of job seekers were disinclined towards using personal contacts at all to find work. For instance when job seekers were asked what advice they would give to youth entering the label market about how to find jobs an open-ended question for which they could provide any response. About 4 in 10 pointed to institutional sources like temporary employment agencies who offer to work transition programs and the like. About another 4 in 10 advised these walk-in strategies. So just going to go down the street see who's hiring and put in the application. The majority some three-quarters strongly encourage new entrants to check local newspapers daily and to surf internet job banks for job postings. This one something of a paradox given that no job seeker I interviewed had ever who searched and submitted resumes via the internet had ever found employment this way not even a peep from employers. But what was most telling was that personal contact use was suggested least often. Just one-third recommended that young job seekers use personal contacts at all. Also when I asked what job search strategies that unemployed job seekers were employing to find work 4 in 10 said that they sought assistance from formal institutions 6 in 10 checked want ads and other media sources and greater than two-thirds did walk-in strategies or used walk-in strategies. Just one and four unemployed job seekers said that they were actively engaging friends and relatives for job finding. Clearly these figures are not mutually exclusive. On average unemployed job seekers list to two search strategies in my sample. Among those using one search strategy half were walk-ins about a quarter sought assistance from formal institutions and another quarter sought information from media sources. No employee job seeker relied solely on personal contacts to find work. So in an effort to understand some job seekers ambivalence towards personal contact use in a labor market context where employers rely heavily on informal job referral networks for hiring. I compared the job search experiences of willing and reluctant personal contact users. Willing personal contact users were job seekers for whom assistance from personal contacts was almost always welcome. So they represented about 74% of all of my respondents and were distinguished by comments that usually took the following form. I always use people that I know, you know, if they have a way to get in or whatever. They're the first ones I go to actually and using friends, relatives, and acquaintances is very important because they actually have the inside scoop. So yeah, I use all the resources that I can. These comments contrast sharply with those of reluctant personal contact users. The 26% of respondents who were disinclined towards relying on friends and family members for help finding work. The latter was characterized by such comments as I try not to use people to get a job mostly. And I mean, if you can get if you can network like that and get a plug in that way, that's fine. But I wouldn't necessarily say that that would be my way of getting a job, you know, because I like to do things on my own or I'm usually on my own out on my own doing my own thing trying to find my own line of work. I'm not saying the input won't help, but I'm usually on my own. When query about their reluctance to concerns emerged essential. As with job holders, both concerns implicated reputation and trust or the lack thereof. First, reluctant job seekers express concern that they would be unable to fulfill their obligations associated with getting help. Specifically, they were concerned that their behavior on the job would almost certainly negatively affect the status and reputation of their job holding relations. And in the end that such an outcome would highlight the extent in nature of their own untrustworthiness and incompetence. And the concerns were not necessarily unwanted. Reluctant personal contact users were more likely to explain their difficulty finding work in terms of past delinquency such as drug and alcohol abuse or felony convictions. Reluctants were also far more likely to have been fired from their last job than were willing personal contact users. Not surprisingly then, reluctance were less likely to feel that their job holding relations would or even should in some instances put their names and reputations on the line for them. And so they often chose not to ask. This was the case for Anthony Redman, a 36 year old high school dropout and convicted felon. Given his circumstances or characteristics, one could not understate his probability of gaining employment. In the search for employment, there are few, if any, attributes that crippled job seekers more. Indeed, when I met Anthony, he had been without steady work for just short of a year, even though he said that he was constantly looking. In part, Anthony explained his difficulty getting a job in terms of his two strikes. Has a black felon, he believed that few employers would seriously entertain the idea of hiring him. And although he expressed a great deal of frustration regarding employers refusal to give him another opportunity to prove his worth, much of his anger about the state of his life was really self-directed. It was clear that no one frustrated Anthony more than he frustrated himself. In his mind, he was his own greatest obstacle and in some ways deserved to be cast aside. That this trust he had inspired in others had largely been warranted. After all, he believed he had little if any well, after all, he had little if any trust in himself. Thus, when he was asked about the importance of using friends, relatives and acquaintances for finding out about job opportunities, Anthony explained that while they were important to the process, he preferred not to rely on this essential source of job finding. Instead, he explained, you ain't got to worry about me using your name to get in the door. Just give me an application, just turn it in for me. That's all I ask you. When I ask Anthony why, he replied, because you know, say if I do get a job and mess up on the job, I won't drag you down with me. So I prefer not to use your name. You got any friends? This is him mimicking what an employer might say to him? No. I heard about it on the website or you know, work first. Probing further, I asked whether Anthony had ever been in a position in which he had botched a job a personal contact had found for him. When he explained that he had not, I pressed further still, asking why he assessed himself as such a high risk. To that, he answered, because things just happen. I'm like bad slip rock. I don't have no luck. None. That's a fact. None. Anthony had come to believe that he had little power to determine the course of his own, his own life would take. His life experiences up until that point had almost completely crushed his sense of self-efficacy and in the process weakened his spirit. Thus he deemed it irresponsible to subject anyone to his unpredictability, his untrustworthiness. He alone owned the task of finding a job, a very lone pursuit for someone with so many individual and structural barriers to overcome and so few tools with which to do so. And just as he perceived himself as untrustworthy, so too did he perceive his friends as such. Consequently, not only was he opposed to receiving job finding assistance from friends and relatives, save receipt of information about job openings, he was also reluctant to proactively assist his friends in their quest for work. He explained, I'll use the same method on others that I use on myself. I used to tell him, I get you an application but don't use me at all. If you mess up a job, it won't fall back on me either. When I asked why he and his friends did not provide more proactive assistance, he provided the following justification. See, my friends, I can't speak for no other people friends, but my friends they not like that. See, we rough next. You see, you all call us thugs and you know ghetto. We just call ourselves rough next because we not thugs. We used to be that. We just different than most people. We see somebody that we know if they need some help. We give some support, help them out and we'll let them, we'll let him or her know, don't use my name because you know how you is. You know your tempo or your attitude. This is a telling quotation for a number of reasons. Anthony clearly perceived himself and his friends as outcasts. Members of a group stigmatized by their delinquent past, but he also distinguished them and they distinguished themselves by their attempts at redemption. Anthony revealed to me that the promise that he made to avoid, made to himself to avoid at all cost the illegal activities that led to his early incarceration. A promise he found increasingly difficult to honor as months of an unemployment approach to year. However, the redemptive process itself was largely in isolation because although members of his group provided some assistance and support, the dominant discourse that they deployed was one of self-sufficiency. In other words, even among members of Anthony's cast of sorts, the stigma of thuggery and untrustworthiness prevailed. And so job seekers could not expect that others would be willing to go to bat form for them. This coupled with individuals unwillingness to seek aid for themselves from personal context forced job seekers of Anthony's ilk into self-sufficiency. They were pulled into self-reliance by their distrust of themselves and the desire to protect or salvage reputations, both their own and others. And they were pushed into the same by their distrusting peers who were too reluctant to assist for fear of the negative consequences. This consistency between their expectations of themselves and those of their job holding relations produced an exaggerated independence. A defensive individualism that informed their job search behaviors. Reluctant personal contact users also expressed great concern that their request for assistance would be met with rejection that would call into question their trustworthiness and competence. In this sense job seekers sense others distrust of them and this perception led to a disinclination to seek assistance from their job holding relations. Compared to willing personal contact users reluctance were far more likely to report that their contacts had responded to their requests or offered assistance in the past in such a way that left them feeling ridiculed and diminished. Whereas 58% of reluctant personal contact users expressed concern 22% of willing personal contact users did. Abigail Tyson fell into the former category. When Abigail and I sat down to talk in the living room of her close friend she was a 32 year old single mother of two daughters who for the past two months had been making $8.50 working at a local on the assembly line of a local manufacturing company. Abigail explained that in the past she had not had problems gaining employment on her own. She could approach any employer convince him or her of her worth and leave with a new job. Indeed she had found both of her prior steady jobs through walking strategies of job search. However after being convicted for retail fraud a felony for which she received two years probation and hefty fines she found it exceedingly difficult to find work. Like Anthony she hypothesized that her conviction rendered her unattractive to employers saying I used to go and fill out applications all the time but did not have trouble with an employer calling me back. Because I didn't have a felony then. I could get a job like that. With the felony however she believes people just throw the application away or something. And yet in the midst of these growing and major and growing obstacles to employment when asked about the importance of using friends and family members to find work she responded I try not to use people to get a job mostly. Prompted to elaborate she explained I probably will use them for reference or something or call and be like I used you for reference I'm going to apply for this job or something like that. But you know like sometimes employers say do you know anybody that work here? Most of the time I say no. So I try to I feel like I can get in if I can get in there by myself then forget it. That's just the type of person I am. Abigail steadfast commitment to work and finding work on her own or at the very least without personal contacts appears to make an intuitive sense. However her general orientation to receiving job finding assistance from friends and relatives does make sense when one considers her prior experiences in this realm. Specifically how she felt she was regarded by those who had approached her in the past. Abigail explained that not long before our meeting she and her friend had approached her sister and the friend's sister-in-law for help securing jobs. Her sister was employed at a company that offered employment, summer employment starting at $11 per hour, a very desirable wage in this community at this point in time. With the possibility of permanent placement at summer's end when Abigail and her friend pressed her sister to provide assistance however pleading won't you help us can't you put our name in or something we'd like to work here and get some computer skills or whatever. Abigail recalled her sister replying no I don't want you to work here you ain't going to mess up my name. Needless to say both Abigail and her sister felt rejected, disappointed, a bit perplexed, feelings that only intensified when they discovered that having refused to grant their request Abigail's sister helped another woman get a job at the same place. According to Abigail her sister made no attempt to refuse their request in a way that would have preserved their dignity, reputations and self-esteem and that would have sustained a long-term relationship of expressive and instrumental exchange. On the contrary her response was much more of an indictment against them an indication that they were far from having earned the trust necessary to partake in such an exchange. No doubt Abigail's bodywork history and felony conviction was a great cause for her sister's concern Abigail was too high a risk to take in her sister's estimation Priors notwithstanding however Abigail interpreted her sister's rejection as an attempt to keep her down. So feeling deeply affronted she vowed to reject any request her sister might make for assistance especially but not limited to request for finding job for job finding assistance but she was also disinclined towards making requests for herself as well to any other relatives that she had access to who could have hooked her up with jobs. Taken together two-thirds of my reluctant personal contact users described one instance after another in which their ability to meet obligations was called into question or their request for assistance were met with scorn. Thus when they declared I like doing things on my own they were showcasing their defensive individualism. Their declarations of autonomy and self-sufficiency and the common commitment and avoidance of personal contact use emerged only after they perceived that help was not forthcoming and in some cases should not be forthcoming less because their ties were unable to assist and in some cases should be unwilling to do so. So by embracing individualism avoiding informal assistance from friends and relatives and pursuing self-reliant the relatively unsuccessful job search strategies not only did they attempt to protect job holders' reputations and to shield their own from further ridicule and disparagement. They also sought to repair their reputations by demonstrating evidence through their self-reliant approaches of their autonomous self-sufficient and driven natures. This is an almost tragic and ironic term as such performances of autonomy and self-sufficiency only serve to disadvantage these reluctant personal contact users further in a low wage labor market context where employers rely heavily on job referral networks for applicant recruitment and screening where job seekers struggle with multiple barriers to employment where decent job opportunities are indeed declining significantly and where employer discrimination is pervasive. So to end on that happy note, thank you very much again for the invitation. Okay, well I'd like to begin by thanking the Poverty Center Skip and the Ford School for the invitation to participate in this very stimulating symposium and also to thank Professor Smith and Professor Patillo for being with us here today to present their research and to honor Dr. King. In my comments I'd like to do two things. One is to identify some of the key themes that emerge from these two books that as they relate to racial inequality and poverty more generally and then two to pose some potential questions for discussion. In doing so I'm going to bring in some aspects of the two books that weren't necessarily covered in detail in the talks. I hope that will serve as a teaser for those of you who haven't gotten a chance to look at them yet to spend some time reading them. There was a lot more material than our two presenters were able to cover in the time they were given. I'll try to be a brief, I know there's people in the audience who have their own questions and comments that they'd like to make. So one of the themes I think that comes out of both of these books is the consequences of growing inequality among African Americans. So this is a trend that's been identified probably three decades ago but we really don't know much about how this is playing out, what the consequences are and so on. So African American middle class has made great advances despite continued racism and discrimination but in some sense an urban poor African American group has been left behind. So we see this for example in the lifestyle conflict that Professor Patillo identifies the barbecue example being a great one where behaviors that are associated with poorer African Americans become stigmatized even though they would be normal behaviors otherwise. And there's also a great discussion in Professor Patillo's book about the role of middle class African Americans as what she calls middle men. So brokers between the African American community and white elites and their ability to enter into white elite networks in Chicago to gain resources for the African American community but on the flip side often in a way that has detrimental consequences for poor African Americans in the community. So the demolition of public housing would be the most obvious example of that. This inequality among African Americans is also highlighted by Professor Smith's research in that we see that the poor African Americans because of the distrust and defensive individualism that she identifies are not as able to take advantage of economic advances among middle class African Americans. A second theme is the continued importance of past racism and racial inequalities in structuring today's urban problems and urban inequality. So this is what Professor Patillo in her book calls the ghost of urban renewal which kind of serves as a backdrop for all of these conflicts within the Kenwood and North Oakland communities that she's writing about. And perhaps the best example of this that she gives is that there's this conflict over resources particularly the type of housing that's going to be in the gentrifying community is a conflict between poor and middle class African Americans but it has to be understood in the context of racial segregation so that a history of racial segregation in Chicago makes it such that white neighborhoods of whatever class have property values that are too high for public housing to be even considered in those neighborhoods. And so that forces public housing to be shifted towards African American neighborhoods. And if we don't realize that historical context then we might just see it as a conflict among African Americans. And we can also see this in Professor Smith's work. I think one of the interesting things to me because I study neighborhoods in concentrated poverty was that a lot of these problems of distrust and defensive individualism that she identifies are actually more of a problem and create more issues for poor African Americans in concentrated poverty context where there's even more of these sort of issues. Another theme in both works is the role of social capital in helping us to understand the micro-dynamics of urban inequality. So in Professor Patela's book she shows how middle class African Americans again are able to become middlemen brokers and to infiltrate white elite social networks and thereby gain power over resources in the city. And for those of you who are interested in the school reform there's a very nice chapter in the book that talks about local school reform and the way that middle class African Americans who move into the Kenwood and North Oakland neighborhood are able to capture sort of the planning process for the local schools and set the schools up in such a way that it particularly benefits students who are well prepared by setting up selective charter schools and leaving behind a good number of the students from poorer families. Professor Smith along these same lines shows us that social capital has to be activated. It's not just inherent in social networks and the inability of her respondents to transform their network ties into job leads helps us to understand a high unemployment among African Americans in the inner city. And then finally one thing that was striking in both books is the way that the Black poor are highly stigmatized group and face additional burdens because of stereotypes that are in a sense unique to them. So Professor Smith in her book has an excellent chapter which she didn't have time to talk about which is kind of an ethnography of Michigan Works job placement and training center. And what's striking there is the way that the managers and the other case workers employ racial stereotypes about their own clients particularly the stereotype that African American men are simply going to be unable to even take advantage of the services. They're just so disadvantaged so lazy etc that they're not even worth helping and they get pushed off and pushed away from the services in part it sounds like to increase the success rate of the managers running the center. Professor Smith's work also highlights the way that African American urban poor sort of internalize some of the stigmatizing stereotypes. I'm not sure if she would agree with this reading of her data but certainly we can see or I see in some of the quotes the idea is that the subject seem to take in those stigmatizing characteristics about being unsuccessful or lazy or easy to give up or so on and that affects their whole worldview with regard to work. And then another example of the black poor being a highly stigmatized group it comes from Professor Patel's book again this idea of the lifestyle differences the barbecue becoming a sign of disorder in the neighborhood and in a sense there are these conflicts that she describes in the book over quality of life issues where middle class residents see anything that they associate with poor African Americans as something that should be criminalized. So barbecuing becomes loitering as perhaps the greatest example. So some questions perhaps for discussion that comes to mind from Professor Patel's work is under what conditions is a stable mixed income or mixed class urban neighborhood possible especially one that benefits all of its residents middle class and poor alike. As Professor Patel described sociologists and other social scientists have been concerned about the pernicious effects of concentrated poverty for a very long time and mixed income neighborhoods are thought to be one solution to that but she also shows how when neighborhoods are in the process of becoming mixed income that conflicts are created over schools rental housing public housing the use of public space the different lifestyle behaviors in public space and there seems to be pretty bleak prospects for the inclusion of poor residents in the long term future in the neighborhood. Maybe that's an exaggeration of how negative things are but it certainly heads in that direction. So in the end in Kenwood in North Oakland it seemed that most changes benefited only the middle class African Americans in the neighborhood. So there were some reduction in crime which of course benefited everyone but a lot of the changes that were put into place were resources that required some degree of initial resources on the part of the individual to take advantage of. So having your children prepared to enter the selective schools or having the money to shop at expensive boutiques or restaurants or even the fancy grocery store. Another question that comes to mind for issues of concentrated poverty and urban inequality is how specific are the problems and issues that we're discussing today? How specific are they to cities like Chicago and Detroit? So these two cities are historically among the most racially segregated in the country have some of the highest rates of concentrated poverty and now I think scholars are beginning to recognize that different cities have very different conditions of concentrated urban poverty. So an example would be University of Chicago sociologist Mario Small who's argued that concentrated urban poverty may be very different in dense cities like New York or Boston compared to post-industrial cities like Chicago and Detroit where poor neighborhoods are especially characterized by depopulation, physical isolation and so on. So are we likely to see different perhaps more optimistic findings in cities such as New York Los Angeles or Boston? More generally a third question is what does the growth of the African-American middle class pretend for racial inequality? So Professor Patila shows us that increased access to power structures and social networks of the powerful for Chicago's African-American middle class but that doesn't necessarily translate into better prospects for most of Chicago's African-American or at least the neighborhood she studies. And more broadly I think she raises the important point that middle class African-Americans can't by themselves deal with larger issues of failing schools, lack of health care fundamental changes in the economy and persistent discrimination. There's a sense I think among her middle class respondents that they have an obligation to sort of uplift their fellow African-Americans and that's certainly noble and important for them to participate in these sort of endeavors but it's also a little bit sad that everybody else thinks that it's just the African-American middle class whose job it is to help the African-American poor. And so along these same lines Professor Smith shows us that distrust and defensive individualism make it difficult for poor African-Americans to take advantage of African-American middle class advances in terms of economic power authority and in control of institutional resources. So I'll stop there. In closing I just want to say that there's much more to these two fascinating books than we've had time to talk about today so I urge you to get your hands on them and spend some time absorbing comments and findings and I look forward to audience discussion and comments. Thanks. Okay the floor is open for questions and if you could please come to the microphone because this is being taped and if you don't speak from the mic it won't get picked up. George? Thank you for two very interesting presentations. Professor Petillo the stylized fact people would argue is that more integrated economically integrated communities provide some protection for the poor in the sense that they're able to mobilize resources to protect the community as whole. Now we know of course that the most segregated economically segregated areas are among the wealthy so clearly it doesn't work that argument doesn't work but is there any evidence at all that there is any distributed good that comes from economic integration of neighborhoods? I think definitely there's lots of evidence of some distributed goods and so that's why I tried to end by saying this is not a wholesale takedown of mixed income community strategies because the people who the poor people who get to stay in these neighborhoods do benefit from the improvement in safety, the improvement in schools some of which are selective enrollment some of which you just have to get your application early and it's a lottery the appearance of businesses and so on the question I guess my critique is two fold. My critique is not of economic integration it's of the some of the pitfalls of economic integration as they are practiced especially in public housing redevelopment is the decrease in hard units for poor people and the fact that by and large the majority of people who were there won't be able to benefit from the new changes so if there were a way to perhaps increase density so that everybody was there can stay and then you just increase density and new people can come in as well I think that's a different kind of approach and then the third part of my critique is that economic integration is one strategy but there could also be strategies where the investment might come before the middle class get there and is not tied to their having to come first before the public sector moves in. Thank you. I have a question for Professor Smith I'm a student in the school of social work and when you were talking you mentioned that distrust could be overcome by people having alternate employment where they could establish a track record of some sort so a social worker may say well okay so maybe we should try to provide those alternative opportunities to them but I suspect the answer is not as simple as that and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on what the paths to those solutions might be I mean I think in good part we're dealing with a population that has multiple and severe barriers to employment right and in part there are people who are in a position to either provide information or influence hires are responding to some of these multiple barriers and those barriers that make it difficult for people to find work also make it difficult for people who can assist to do so and as David pointed out not only did I find that among personal contacts I also found that within the context of the job center having multiple barriers made it so that people were less inclined towards putting forward assistance that could move people forward so I think what becomes important here then is providing programs and structures that deal with the barriers themselves and I think once that happens you'll find that people's behaviors start to look at least in terms from the perspective of the job holders will start to look a lot more responsible so I think that that's the root of a lot of these issues right so people can't get to work on time transportation was one of the major issues that my respondents talked about in terms of being able to get to work spotty transportation services public transportation services transportation that didn't go to various parts of the metro area that made it really very difficult having appropriate childcare or safe and affordable childcare also was another issue that people brought up so there were a number of factors that got in the way of being able to establish track records that were fairly long and positive in terms of the relationships with employers and I think that when job holders then were in a position to determine whether or not to assist they were in some ways drawing from this I mean there are other issues too drug abuse was something or alcohol abuse those were issues that some of my contact my respondents would talk about and here again these require good measure programs that deal with those issues and a discourse that makes it okay to seek assistance when you have those kinds of problems but in none of these situations that led to these multiple barriers to employment were their programs that were fairly effective at dealing with them so people dealt with them on their own or didn't do anything and I think it made it so that they appeared far less marketable people who would want to put their names on the line so that they would look at the way that they did so I think by dealing with those deep rooted problems you would affect the way that these job seekers look in such a way that would make it so that anybody would want to put their names on the line for them but that doesn't exist nor do I think it will given the current disposition towards the problems that exist in these kinds of neighborhoods so I think we need to shift our thinking about it and think about it through that that I think greater trust will emerge and people will become more cooperative I just want to add one interesting thing about what are some of the barriers to work is people's many obligations to the various welfare state programs that they're connected to so it's hard to go to work when you get an appointment with the person down at public housing office and if you don't go to the person down at public housing office you're not going to get your housing choice voucher and so you know these competing whatever it might be appointment you have to keep that all happen nine to five at the same time you're supposed to be at work or another source of challenge. Mary I have a question for you I'm really fascinated by the barbecue example for reasons that you might already anticipate I mean one thing that fascinated me was this idea that there's certain spaces where particular behavior should take place so a barbecue should happen in your backyard it shouldn't happen on a roadway where I presume people are driving are driving by and the second reason that it interested me was because it suggested that the middle class people believe this is our neighborhood and even though we have mixed income housing we're only letting you stay here we're sort of tolerating you and the condition under which you can stay here is that you must remain invisible so I wonder how much of the fact that working class people were on public display is also a factor in addition to the fact that they've moved this backyard behavior into this public space. Yes I mean seriously I think you're exactly right I think it's about it's about the use of public space most especially I mean I think you hit it right on the nose there's two things going on it's the assumption that the way that middle class people can socialize everybody can socialize and the just sheer not thinking through the fact that everybody doesn't have a backyard I mean if you if I showed more pictures of Drexel it's lined by large courtyard apartment buildings and some of the courtyards they have back stairways but you'd rather not people barbecue on those lest you put the whole thing on fire so it's a better it's a smarter choice to barbecue in front so the people not thinking through a lot of these things everything from you know people complain why is people always sitting on their porch talking on their phone doing all a business out on a porch well it's summertime and they don't have air conditioning you have central air it's really comfortable in your house it's not if your house is overcrowded and you have you know it's quieter on the porch to talk on the phone than in the house to talk on the phone so just not thinking through how people's economic circumstances lead to certain different uses of public space and uses of people's bodies and so on and so forth and then the second thing I think you're just a hundred percent right it's so interesting to counter pose the celebration of group uses of public space when it is consumer driven things like cafes on streets and restaurants on streets where you can see in in more affluent neighborhoods as well as middle class neighborhoods and that as long as you're sitting there you know you are paying for a dinner you are buying a drink right there as opposed to free uses of public space which seem to be more denigrated especially when it's poor people I mean I think you're exactly right about not wanting to see poor people in public whether it's doing things like barbecuing or old it's a lot of old men who just who sit around and drink and and have little boomboxes and play the blues I mean even that is people are very interested in the property values and what's that going to mean for potential buyers who are driving through the neighborhood and what that will mean for the potential upward trend of property values I do want because I hardly ever get the opportunity to talk about the flip side and I think David mentioned this so I have this idea of middle class brokers and I have examples in the book where people are brokering important resources for this neighborhood so the brokerage happens both in terms of its establishment of forms of inequality but also it's bringing of very important resources so the people who run nonprofits in the neighborhood and the people who run social service agencies these are middle middlemen as well these are brokers as well and they are both they are fighting for affordable housing they are bringing the schools have a mixed valence but they're often brought very much with the intention of bringing what should have been in this poor black neighborhood for years so the language by brokers is one very much that includes this uplift it's just that there is a tension between sometimes there's a tension in strategies what's in the best interest of the black community Thank you for your important work my question is kind of related to Karen's I'm just wondering about home ownership and this modern urban renewal and do you see home ownership is like a major issue especially for black people and if so what type of possibilities do you see implications from home ownership I might ask you to elaborate a little more I mean the vast majority of people moving into the neighborhood are purchasing as opposed to renting even though the majority of the neighborhood is still renters because there's a lot of multi-unit buildings so tell me a little bit more I'm thinking about what Karen said with people feeling like these poor people on public display and maybe they feel like I bought into this place these people are renting and they feel more of a sense of ownership so I was just wondering do you feel that is there a possibility for these people who are in this mixed income neighborhood to eventually buy in is that a possibility is that something that I think I understand there's no question that the ownership rhetoric is key and it's actually something I don't think I elaborate I didn't it would have been nice to take that analogy to talk about when you buy a house it's almost like not only are you now a homeowner but you're a community owner that that's the key and the big rhetoric is all around I pay taxes and it's all about as a taxpayer as a taxpayer everything has to work the way they want it to work because their taxpayers and renters aren't so so tax paying is a big part of the rhetoric around ownership and but the rhetoric is not around renters should immediately become owners and then they'll get due respect I don't think there's such naivete around people's quick upward mobility that kind of thing I is that getting at what you're saying I still feel like I'm a little missing something one of the things this sort of ties into what George said but I think in part because the white poverty rate is so low you don't see these kinds of situations develop but the one I thought of as you were just talking is in the areas near the university the homeowners talk about the students the same way the middle class African Americans in your community talk about the poor these people sit on the porch they leave their beer kegs in the front yard and indeed close to campus there are neighborhoods that are trying to get it rezoned so that they're not multi so it one of the questions is how many of these things are class conflicts that would be similar in the white community if there were these class interactions but because there's a smaller white poverty rate you may not have this kind of concentration but that that language sounds very familiar Sylvia hi I enjoyed all three presentations I wanted to ask you because you know a lot of your work stems from the work initially of William Julius Wilson Bill Wilson and how he studied the issue of joblessness in the black community and I remember that and when work disappears in particular which is based in Chicago and he talked about the nature of poverty in Chicago neighborhoods in the 1950s and how that had changed and then in the 1980s and on you get you know the decline of manufacturing and so on and so forth and that's really when joblessness sets in and one of the things that was in there which I think Sandra alluded to is that the issue of role models because I think that Wilson thought that in the 50s when the black community all lived together with respect to a social class there were people who were poor but there were the working poor and there were a lot of very good role models for young kids who were very poor while when the community in the 80s and on becomes jobless then in fact you also lose the good role models that the working poor didn't have and I just wondered if you could say something about the issue of role models in the community so that's for me then issue of role models in the community you know one of the questions that we asked in this study was about the role models that people had as they were coming up role models around work and so a lot of our respondents were the kids of people who were working in the big three so they saw their fathers working and sometimes their mothers didn't work but often times their mothers did mothers and aunts etc. also worked in the factories and I think a lot of them envisioned that this would be their future and most of them were pretty happy with that so they felt like when they were coming up a lot of them felt like there were possibilities but the structure of opportunities changed I think while people saw that the structure of opportunities changed they didn't necessarily make the link between those changes and their inability to make ends meet so I would have so for instance I would have several young men who would talk about how their fathers were able to take care of the whole family on one income and they're struggling to make their paychecks last on their own and I couldn't understand why they couldn't be the kinds of men that their fathers were so in some ways I think it's kind of debilitating because psychologically the models of real men were models from over a generation ago where men could actually either take care of their families on their own or do most of the work so these were real men who figured out how to make it work they don't have the same kinds of opportunities but have the same kinds of desires and so it leaves them feeling less than men it leaves them feeling emasculated in a lot of ways and I think that that's part of what they're struggling with this is in part what's making it so that people want to do things on their own their fathers were able to get things done but they don't seem to be able to make that happen and I think that this is in part what they're struggling with so it was interesting that the models set in their heads what seemed to be possible a lot of that didn't change I actually think some of Al's work Minds of Marginalized Men shows this there's the image of the factory worker and the stable jobs remains but they're not able to achieve that and on some level I don't think that people are getting quite why that's the case and so it's making them feel as if there's something that they've done wrong so that was a really interesting part of it and I think the majority of my respondents were kind of like this so they had these they had family members who were embedded in factory work as they were coming up and so had some measure of stability in that shifted as they became adults so yeah I think the interesting thing about the assumption of role models is also that the in these neighborhoods that I study which are relatively contrived because you know you have you end up with a whole bunch of vacant land because you've torn down a whole bunch of public housing and then you build something totally new and then you bring in people who don't have a clue coming from all very so they're very contrived and I think that makes the kind of place I'm studying more unique although my first book was more of the kind of nostalgic mixed income community this the kind of places I'm studying now are more contrived but what we don't I don't what the nostalgia for role models doesn't capture is the mix of modeling that the working people give off so in the these contrived neighborhoods that have really stark distinctions between upper income people and lower income people the upper income people are modeling not just work but a whole bunch of things that poor people don't like meaning for the poor people who live there those people don't know how to act they don't know how to be social they don't know how to speak to their neighbors they build back decks when they could be sitting on the front porch I heard a horrific story the other day in one of these mixed income communities I was meeting with some tenant leaders and in her neighborhood where there's kind of a series of row houses that are public housing on one side and upper income housing on the other side the people who live in the upper income housing go across the street to walk their dogs in front of the public housing and let their dogs do their business on the other side of the street I mean they just so the stories that people that the public housing residents are telling in some of these very contrived communities these are not people to be looking up to I don't care if they do get up and go to work that's the other thing they're at work all day and when they come home they close their doors I mean they search on mixed income communities finds that there isn't the friendships are not being made people are not you're putting a lot of things together so I think we have a very sanguine view of what these mixed income communities can do but that's because that's because we middle class folk think that we've done it alright and we're we're really nice people and we know how to do it but some of our life ways are equally objectionable as some of the things we object to on the other side I want to thank this is slightly a slightly different point than the one that what Mary was making and it connects back to David Harding's question about what does growth of African-American middle class pretend for racial inequality I mean I think with the growth of the black middle class it gives people the perception that our opportunity structure is open right how can it not be if they're not so many people who are well dressed good looking like people who are in positions of of note and so I think people at least the people that I interviewed and I suspect that they're not unusual one they have the image of the past where there there was hope two they have the image of people who seem to be really successful now so they know that there's a growth of a black middle class they see people on TV and they might actually have friends and well not friends but family members who are actually doing really well not to make this personal but I have a brother who's not doing as well as I am and he understands his failure to do as well because in terms of my success you did it because you worked really hard I'm not doing as well because I made bad choices it's all about the choices that I made that left me behind so I think in some ways in the growth of the middle class and even the role models that people had in the past it's making it so people are embracing even more these individualistic understandings of their own disadvantage right it's because I'm not or we're not as individuals doing what we need to do to get ahead because clearly my father did it and clearly these other people are doing it good for you for doing so well I need to try harder and it takes our eyes off of the structural conditions that lead to the perpetuation of inequality over time and that is what I think ends up getting lost time and time again I actually can't have conversations with my brother anymore because he refuses to talk about structural issues and only wants to talk about how hard people are working and so it makes it I think it makes it really problematic and I think it makes opportunities for mobilizing for change very difficult because people keep focusing on what the individual has failed to do or keeps doing in order to succeed I want to thank both of our speakers and our discussant and the audience and invite everybody to a reception and informal chat out in the lobby thanks