The End of Poverty, or the Emergence of the Horizontal Ghetto? Post-Public Housing, Spatial Concentration and Young Adult Transition in Baltimore

Author: Eva Rosen

Dissertation School: Harvard University

Abstract:

In the past 15 years, we have seen an important transformation in concentrated poverty. The dissolution of large-scale public housing in Baltimore has resulted in great social turmoil and the displacement of the city's poorest and most vulnerable population, many of whom are youth. The vertical ghetto-the high-rise public housing development-has remade itself into the horizontal ghetto-the concentration of Housing Choice Voucher users in moderately poor neighborhoods. Federally assisted housing comprises 20 percent of the rental market in Baltimore, and Section 8 vouchers make up 5.4 percent, one of the highest rates of any city more than 500,000 in the United States. These "Section 8" neighborhoods are also characterized by extremely high residential churning, and by high rates of crime and violence. Will the social ills that plagued America's public housing over the past 30 years follow the poor as they relocate to new neighborhoods? It is imperative that we learn more about the neighborhoods families are moving to, the forms of social organization that exist there, and the consequences these contexts have for the young adults who grow up in these areas.

In his seminal work, The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argued that living in a poor neighborhood has important consequences for life changes, independent of individual poverty levels (1987). In the 1990s, his theory of social isolation contributed to the widespread redevelopment of distressed public housing projects in an effort to de-concentrate poverty (Massey and Denton 1993). However, HUD has suggested that Section 8 voucher recipients are clustering together in these neighborhoods of moderate poverty, rather than spreading out among low-poverty neighborhoods (Orr et al. 2003). If the transformation of public housing has placed more of the nation's needy households in neighborhoods that are characterized not by sky-high poverty concentration, but rather, by moderate poverty along with high rates of residential churning and social disorder, it might mean that the mechanisms by which neighborhoods transmit various advantages and disadvantages to the families that reside within them have been fundamentally transformed. As we move away from typical neighborhoods of concentrated poverty that urban sociologists have studied over the past 30 years, what are the mechanisms through which neighborhoods have their effects in these new post-public housing neighborhoods? How does this new neighborhood context shape aspirations and behavior relevant to the transition to adulthood?

In the first part of my dissertation I rise quantitative spatial analysis to document the emergence and prevalence of these Section 8 "ghettos," and describe their characteristics, especially with reference to residential instability and measures of social control. Using HUD data and data from the American Community Survey, I show where these spatial concentrations of Section 8 voucher use are occurring using GIS. I use this data to choose one Baltimore neighborhood of high voucher use, moderate poverty, and high residential instability.

In the second part of my dissertation, I examine this neighborhood ethnographically: I will conduct ethnographic observation and interviews with 80 youths, ages 16-22. I will also conduct 60 interviews with adults, including parents, teachers, police, and ministers. The fieldwork will address the following research questions: What forms of social control exist? In what ways do adults in the neighborhood regulate youth behavior? How does a neighborhood context of high residential churning and moderate poverty affect youth's strategies for coping with high crime and violence? What strategies of action do youth employ? How do these strategies relate to important decisions surrounding the transition to adulthood? The combination of ethnographic observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews will provide a multifaceted understanding of both lived experience and interactional events, as well as their behavior and aspirations.

With the dismantling of the public housing high-rises in Baltimore and the dramatic increase in number of Housing Choice Vouchers, former public housing residents have re-concentrated disproportionately in poor neighborhoods. It is, therefore, imperative that researchers and policymakers know more about what kinds of social organization these neighborhoods facilitate and how these social relations shape cultural schema that play an important role in the transition to adulthood and the social reproduction of poverty.

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