The Social Organization of Black Suburban Poverty: An Ethnographic Community Study

Author: Alexandra K. Murphy

Dissertation School: The Trustees of Princeton University

Abstract:

During the 1990s, poverty increased significantly in U.S. suburbs; as of the year 2000 the suburbs became home to the greatest share of the poor. For the most part, what we know about suburban poverty is limited to demographic trends. This research seeks to move beyond these descriptive snapshots. Using Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh suburb, as a case-study, three primary questions guide this research:

1. How is poverty socially organized and what is everyday life like for the suburban poor?
2. How is the social and economic life of the wider community organized around poverty in the suburbs?
3. To what extent are these neighborhoods economically, politically, and socially isolated from the broader metropolitan community?

In asking these questions I am interested in the social situations of three different suburban actors: (1) poor residents, (2) institutions, and (3) local government.

Urban poverty research has demonstrated that unique features of the urban environment, such as dense housing, mixed-use space, and sidewalks, play an integral role in shaping collective efficacy in poor neighborhoods, social isolation, and subsistence strategies. Suburbs, however, often do not feature such characteristics; here the landscape is frequently marked by more homes than apartments, commercial enterprises zoned to strip malls with little mixed-use space, and few public spaces where people can congregate. What do these differences in the built environment mean for three features of daily life important to the poor: (1) the creation of networks and subsistence strategies, (2) access to antipoverty organizations, and (3) neighborhood social control and order?

To get at the social, political, and economic location (and potential isolation) of the suburb in the broader metropolitan ecology I include in my research the study of a wide range of suburban institutions (churches, business, human services, schools) and the municipal government. My focus here is on the challenges that poverty places on these institutions, the resources they have at their disposal to meet these challenges, and the tools they use to address and/or control poverty. It has been argued that suburban poverty exists in a “policy blindspot;” examining these institutional dynamics will allow me to investigate this assertion more closely. ,p>To answer these questions I employ ethnographic methods. Following classical ethnographic community studies I have moved into a poor, African-American neighborhood in Penn Hills. Currently, I am conducting participant observation in businesses, churches, public spaces, restaurants, NAACP meetings, and people’s homes in order to observe interaction and meet people, 12 of whom have become informants. These informants have let me into their lives and allowed me to follow them for extended periods of time so I may gain in-depth understanding of their daily life. Eventually, I will use in-depth interviews to systematically probe deeper into their life histories and worldviews.

I regularly attend a variety of public community meetings in order to gain insights into what poverty problems the municipality faces and how it addresses them. This is supplemented by in-depth interviews with organizational leaders and municipal, county, and state officials. I am interning in the planning department which provides me a unique opportunity to observe firsthand how municipal governance works around the issue of poverty. To document everyday life, I am collecting spatial data (for example, addresses of vacant lots, code violations, human service clients) that will be used to create maps. These maps will incorporate photos of the suburb that I will take during the duration of the study. Such maps will illustrate conditions of suburban poverty and be useful in understanding the spatial relationships of social life. Supplementing this is systematic analysis of primary documents.

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