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A NEW LOOK AT RACE
AND POVERTY IN THE METROPOLIS

Excerpts from the latest work by William Julius Wilson

When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor
by William Julius Wilson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

William Julius Wilson, one of the country 's most influential sociologists, taught at the University of Chicago for 24 years. He is now the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at Harvard University. In this, his latest book, Wilson assesses the loss of blue-collar jobs and the effects of the "suburbanization" of employment, which has excluded the black urban poor.

Since the early twentieth century, Chicago has been a laboratory for the scientific investigation of the social, economic, and historical forces that create and perpetuate economically depressed and isolated urban communities. The most distinctive phase of this research, referred to as the Chicago School of urban sociology, was completed before 1950 and was conducted by social scientists at the University of Chicago. Immediately following World War I, the Chicago School produced several classic studies, many of which were conducted under the guidance of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess over the next three decades. These studies often combined statistical and observational analysis in making distinctive empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of urban processes, social problems and urban growth, and, commencing in the late 1930s, the nature of race and class subjugation in urban areas.

The Chicago social scientists recognized and legitimized the neighborhood — including the ghetto neighborhood — as a subject for scientific analysis. Chicago, a community of neighborhoods, was considered a laboratory from which generalizations about broader urban conditions could be made.

The perspectives on urban processes that guided the Chicago School's approach to the study of race and class have undergone subtle changes through the years. In the 1920s, Park and Burgess argued that the immigrant slums, and the social problems that characterized them, were temporary conditions on the pathway toward inevitable progress. They further maintained that blacks represented the latest group of migrants involved in the "interaction cycle" that "led from conflict to accommodation to assimilation."

The view that blacks fit the pattern of immigrant assimilation appeared in subsequent studies by E. Franklin Frazier in the 1930s. But Frazier, an African-American sociologist trained at the University of Chicago, also recognized and emphasized a problem ignored in the earlier work of Park and Burgess — the important link between the black family structure and the industrial economy. Frazier believed that the availability of employment opportunities in the industrial sector would largely determine the upward mobility of African-Americans and their eventual assimilation into American life.

In 1945, a fundamental revision in the Chicago framework came with the publication of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's classic study. Black Metropolis. Drake and Cayton first examined black progress in employment, housing, and social integration using census survey, and archival data. Their analysis clearly revealed the existence of a color line that effectively blocked black occupational, residential, and social mobility. They demonstrated that any assumption about urban blacks duplicating the immigrant experience had to confront the issue of race.

28 / December 1996 Illinois Issues

Moreover, as the historian Alice O'Connor puts it, "Drake and Cayton recognized that the racial configuration of Chicago was not the expression of an organic process of city growth, but the product of human behavior, institutional practices and political decisions."

Black Metropolis also deviated from the earlier Chicago School studies in its inclusion of an ethnographic study. Using W. Lloyd Warner's anthropological techniques, Drake and Cayton studied patterns of daily life in three of Chicago's South Side community areas (Washington Park, Grand Boulevard, and Douglas). They labeled these three areas

"Bronzeville," a term that was used by the local residents themselves to describe their community. Combining data based on the Chicago Schoolstyle research and anthropological methods, Black Metropolis presented a much less encouraging view of the prospects for black progress.

In the revised and enlarged edition of Black Metropolis published in 1962, Drake and Cayton examined the changes that had occurred in Bronzeville since the publication of the first edition with a sense of optimism. They felt that America in the 1960s was "experiencing a period of prosperity" and that African- Americans were "living in the era of integration." Of course, they had no way of anticipating the rapid social and economic deterioration of communities like Bronzeville that would begin in the next decade.

The most fundamental difference between today's inner-city neighborhoods and those studied by Drake and Cayton is the much higher levels of jobless-ness. Indeed, there is a new poverty in our nation's metropolises that has consequences for a range of issues relating to the quality of life in urban areas, including race relations.

By "the new urban poverty," I mean poor, segregated neighborhoods in which a substantial majority of individual adults are either unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force altogether.

Looking at Drake and Cayton's Bronzeville, I can illustrate the magnitude of the changes that have occurred in many inner-city ghetto neighborhoods in recent years. A majority of adults held jobs in the three Bronzeville areas in 1950, but by 1990 only four in ten in Douglas worked in a typical week, one in three in Washington Park, and one in four in Grand Boulevard. In 1950, 69 percent of all males 14 and over who lived in the Bronzeville neighborhoods worked in a typical week, and in 1960, 64 percent of this group were so employed. However, by 1990 only 37 percent of all males 16 and over held jobs in a typical week in these three neighborhoods.

ALSO BY WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON

POWER, RACISM, AND PRIVILEGE

THE DECLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF RACE

THE TRULY DISADVANTAGED

THROUGH DIFFERENT EYES (CO-EDITOR)

THE GHETTO UNDERCLASS (EDITOR)

SOCIOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC AGENDA (EDITOR)

POVERTY, INEQUALITY AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL POLICY (CO-EDITOR)

Neighborhoods plagued by high levels of jobless-ness are more likely to experience low levels of social organization: the two go hand in hand. High rates of jobless-ness trigger other neighborhood problems that undermine social organization, ranging from crime, gang violence, and drug trafficking to family breakups and problems in the organization of family life.

Neighborhoods that offer few legitimate employment opportunities, inadequate job information networks, and poor schools lead to the disappearance of work. That is, where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs, and where there is a disruptive or degraded school life purporting to prepare youngsters for eventual participation in the workforce, many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy; they no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives. In the case of young people, they may grow up in an environment that lacks the idea of work as a central experience of adult life — they have little or no labor-force attachment. These circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income, thereby further weakening their attachment to the legitimate labor market.

On the other hand, many inner-city ghetto residents who maintain a connection with the formal labor market — that is, who continue to be employed mostly in low-wage jobs — are, in effect, working against all odds. They somehow manage to work steadily despite the lack of work-support networks (car pools, informal job information networks), institutions (good schools and training programs), and systems (child care and transportation) that most of the employed population in this country rely on. Moreover, the travel costs, child care costs, and other employment-related expenses consume a significant portion of their already meager incomes. In other words, in order to fully appreciate the problems of employment experienced by inner-city ghetto workers, one has to understand that there is both a unique reality of work and a culture of work.

Illinois Issues December 1996 / 29

The more central cities are plagued by joblessness, dysfunctional schools, and crime, the more the suburbs undergo a decline.

Accordingly, as we examine the adaptations and responses of ghetto residents to persistent joblessness, it should be emphasized that the disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods is the function of a number of factors beyond their control. Too often, as reflected in the current public policy debates on welfare reform, the discussion of behavior and social responsibility fails to mention the structural underpinnings of poverty and welfare. The focus is mainly on the shortcomings of individuals and families and not on the structural and social changes in the society at large that have made life so miserable for many inner-city ghetto residents or that have produced certain unique responses and behavior patterns over time.

The disappearance of work in many inner-city neighborhoods is in part related to the nationwide decline in the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Fundamental structural changes in the new global economy, including changes in the distribution of jobs and in the level of education required to obtain employment, resulted in the simultaneous occurrence of increasing jobless- ness and declining real wages for low- skilled workers. The decline of the mass production system, the decreasing availability of lower-skilled blue-collar jobs, and the growing importance of training and education in the higher-growth industries adversely affected the employment rates and earnings of low- skilled black workers, many of whom are concentrated in inner-city ghettos. The growing suburbanization of jobs has aggravated the employment woes of poor inner-city workers. Most ghetto residents cannot afford an automobile and therefore have to rely on public transit systems that make the connection between inner-city neighborhoods and suburban job locations difficult and time-consuming.

The reader should also be reminded that changes in the class, racial, and demographic composition of inner-city neighborhoods contributed to the high percentage of jobless adults who continue to live there. The proportion of nonpoor families and prime-age working adults has decreased. Today, joblessness is more strongly associated with poverty than in previous years. In the face of increasing and prolonged joblessness, the declining proportion of nonpoor families and the overall depopulation make it more difficult to sustain basic neighborhood institutions or to achieve adequate levels of social organization. The declining presence of working- and 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). The economic marginality of the ghetto poor is cruelly reinforced, therefore, by conditions in the neighborhoods in which they live.

Finally, it is important to keep the following point in focus. In addition to changes in the economy and in the class, racial, and demographic composition of inner-city ghetto neighborhoods, certain government programs and policies contributed, over the last fifty years, to the evolution of jobless ghettos. Prominent among these are the early actions of the FHA in withholding mortgage capital from inner-city neighborhoods, the manipulation of market incentives that trapped blacks in the inner cities and lured middle-class whites to the suburbs, the construction of massive federal housing projects in inner-city neighborhoods, and, since 1980, the New Federalism, which, through its insistence on localized responses to social problems, resulted in drastic cuts in spending on basic urban programs. Just when the problems of social dislocation in jobless neighborhoods have escalated, the city has fewer resources with which to address them.

Perhaps at no other time in the nation's history has it been more important to talk about the need to promote city and suburban cooperation, not separation. The political fragmentation of many metropolitan areas in the United States has contributed to the problems of joblessness and related social dislocations of the inner-city poor. As David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has pointed out, because the older cities of the East and the Midwest were unable to expand territorially through city-county consolidation or annexation, they failed to reap such benefits of suburban growth as the rise of the shopping malls, offices, and industrial parks in new residential subdivisions. As areas in which poor minorities live in higher and higher concentration, these cities face an inevitable downward spiral because they are not benefiting from suburban growth. Rusk argues, therefore, that neighborhood revitalization programs, such as community development banks, nonprofit inner-city housing developments, and enterprise zones, will not be able "to reverse the downward slide of inner cities" if they are not carried out within "a framework of actions to bring down the walls between city and suburb."

Efforts to promote city and suburban cooperation will not benefit cities alone. There is mounting evidence that cities and suburbs are economically interdependent. The more central cities are plagued by joblessness, dysfunctional schools, and crime, the more the surrounding suburbs undergo a decline in their own social and economic fortunes. Suburbs that experienced increases in income during the 1980s tended to be linked to a thriving urban center. In the global economy, metropolitan regions continue to compete for jobs. Suburbs that will remain or become competitive are those with a well-trained workforce, good schools, a concentration of professional services, first-class hospitals, a major university and research center, and an efficient transportation network to link executives with other parts of the world. However, many of these elements cannot come solely from the suburbs. They require a viable central city. It is important for Americans to realize that city-suburban integration is the key to the health of metropolitan regions and to the the nation as a whole.

30 / December 1996 Illinois Issues