The rising political profile of income inequality, particularly in the current presidential election cycle, has failed to quell callous pontification about the lifestyles and choices of low-income Americans. David French recently wrote in the National Review that white working-class communities are “killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate,” bemoaning “how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives” when he interacted with low-income individuals through his church in Kentucky. He wrote in defense of a similar proclamation by Kevin Williamson, who declared that “these dysfunctional, downscale communities” cannot escape their defective culture and “deserve to die.” Both pieces ultimately suggested that low-income Americans, if they desire better lives, should simply rent a U-Haul and move to communities with more thriving economies.
Blatant contemptuousness aside, French and Williamson’s proposal illustrates a clear lack of understanding of modern American poverty; such a seemingly simple task is essentially impossible for someone without the savings or the income to sustain the costs of moving, let alone the higher cost of living often associated with more affluent neighborhoods. Low-income people in the United States are often trapped in areas with little economic opportunity by anti-poverty programs that narrowly focus on the regions where they already live, while policies designed to promote greater geographic mobility would better address the obstacles to well-being faced by the least affluent. In short, the poverty trap is a function of systematically declining geo-economic mobility, which receives insufficient attention from policymakers.
Geographic mobility has played a key role in population changes in the United States, from the waves of migration into the western frontier before 1890 to movement into cities in the early 1900s and the burgeoning of the Sunbelt since 1960. The ability to move between communities remains important today, as growth rates between various metropolitan areas vary significantly. However, the percentage of residents who changed addresses within the previous year has been declining since the 1980s. At the same time, poverty has become more concentrated in the last decade. By the period of 2010-2014, the percent of the nation’s low-income residents bearing the double burden of experiencing poverty in a poor place increased by 4.4 percentage points over the 2000 proportion, and almost 14 million people lived in neighborhoods with 40 percent (or higher) poverty rates. Particularly for those living in regions of concentrated poverty, especially those who did not attend college, moving to a more economically vigorous area is a difficult and unlikely prospect.
For many low-income workers, the financial burdens of moving are prohibitive. Minimum wage jobs pay too little to allow for the accumulation of savings and permit little to no employee control over schedules. In the words of Barbara Ehrenreich (an author and activist who wrote the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America based on her experiences working as a waitress, a Wal-Mart associate, a nursing-home aide, and a house-cleaning service maid), it is expensive to be poor in the United States: the alternative to having cooking appliances is overpriced convenience store food, high-priced residential motels often become the housing option available to those who cannot afford the deposit for renting an apartment, and the least affluent are far more likely to rely on predatory payday loans than those with higher incomes (indeed, Americans without bank accounts may spend up to 10 percent of their incomes on check cashing or payday loan services). Where individuals lack the money to purchase goods, they will pay with their time instead: long bus commutes in place of cars or laundromat trips necessitated by not having a washing machine. Especially given that the majority of Americans have savings of under 1,000 dollars and one-fifth do not have a savings account at all, individuals with low wages simply should not be asked by any reasonable policymaker to garner the funds for renting a U-Haul, traveling to another city, and paying the security deposit and the first month’s rent on a new residence.
Another barrier to moving to places with superior opportunities resides in the anti-poverty programs themselves. From the Great Society’s efforts to develop impoverished neighborhoods to the 1980s attempts to create “enterprise zones” to encourage growth where it was lacking and a more recent priority of incentivizing home ownership under the George W. Bush administration, national poverty relief programs have not only failed to significantly reduce the poverty rate, but have also tied beneficiaries to their current location. Place-based anti-poverty initiatives have been hampered by the assumption that all low-income areas are similar, as well as an underlying conviction that poverty could be alleviated on a local scale rather than on a systemic level; while limited geographic mobility is not the only factor contributing to poverty, it is one affecting incomes at a national level and one ignored by place-based programs.
Moreover, because the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act reconstituted welfare in block grants to the states, some states make assistance less accessible and less substantial than others. Even if moving does not significantly reduce the amount of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits available, those who move will still have to take on the process of re-enrolling in social services, which can often be quite daunting in itself. For families dependent on TANF (a program that provides quite limited support already), the fraught process of receiving benefits renders relocation across state lines particularly difficult. Thus, some of the programs designed to support the least affluent actually reduce the geographic mobility, and subsequent ability to choose to live in a place offering a greater quality of life, of those beneficiaries. A bureaucratically nightmarish amalgam of place-based poverty relief programs instituted to target urban slums do not offer an effective paradigm for addressing recent iterations of poverty, which, among other traits, is more prevalent in dispersed suburban populations.
A possible policy alternative lies in incentivizing low-income individuals and families to relocate through “mobility vouchers.” If those receiving unemployment insurance in regions with above-average joblessness rates obtained part of their benefits as coverage for the costs of moving, it would become more feasible for them to move to stronger labor markets; anyone who remained in economically struggling areas would benefit from others leaving in the form of decreased competition for jobs. Mobility grants allowing recipients to obtain their future unemployment benefits in one sum would offer funds for the up-front costs of relocation and job searching, and costs for exited communities could be offset with reductions in the amount of time that individuals may spend on the unemployment rolls. The only extant federal program providing relocation support is Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), but it applies specifically to workers whose jobs are lost to trade agreements and excludes many who might like to move with complicated eligibility requirements. By extending the underlying principles of TAA to anyone receiving unemployment insurance in areas with high unemployment rates, states can significantly increase geographic mobility and make possible beneficial relocations for low-income individuals otherwise prevented by up-front costs.
Ultimately, research has not always found that assistance to low-income families in moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods has substantial impacts on economic outcomes, but agreement is more consistent on the benefits to mental health and overall well-being of living in neighborhoods with lower rates of poverty, and recent work by Harvard economists suggests that growing up in a low-poverty neighborhood raised the incomes of those studied by their mid-twenties. Given that an approach to poverty reduction focused on improving and maintaining the location of the least affluent has not been particularly effective, policies to encourage geographic mobility are a worthwhile opportunity to both improve the economic station of low-income individuals and provide markets in need of labor with needed workers. Before pundits like French and Williamson condemn the lack of responsibility of the low-income, they ought to recognize the incredible barriers to moving faced by families and individuals in poverty; fortunately, these challenges might be rectified by policy.