An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty | Hacker News Reader

An Atlas of Upward Mobility Shows Paths Out of Poverty

nytimes.com

50 pointsMichaelCORS34 comments

The article often mentions school disctricts and their effect on house pricing. I've heard the same thing time and again from relatives in Palo Alto.

It's awkward for me to see how the US restricts free choice between public schools. In this part of western Europe, except for queueing on enrollment and capped numbers, you just go to the school your parents decide to put enroll you at.

If understand correctly, the public school monopolies in the US are because mostly local taxation and much less higher level (state or federal) taxation funds local schools.

It might be interesting to see an experiment where kids from let's say East Palo Alto can go to schook in Palo Alto if their parents want so....

To give you another example, within my city there are 5 high schools and their rankings are vastly different. Students can only go the high school within their district of the city. Thus the housing prices are vastly different between the districts by 2x in some cases. Note that all the schools get the same funding. It is just that the parents wanting high achievement for their students put them in the better performing high school making the imbalance even worse and and the same time causing a housing imbalance.

So even people paying taxes _to the same city_ can't go to this city's public school of their liking? Is this a US wide policy, or is that decided on a city level?

I know it is generally true in California. And their intention is to balance out the attendance to the various schools. And it was not always bad like this. I feel it became worse when a state wide test ranking system was created then people knew which schools were better performing and started flocking towards them so things got imbalanced.

You can't understand America, especially any topic having to do with housing or schooling, without understanding our deep-seated racial conflicts. Pull up a public school profile in any U.S. city that has a large black or hispanic population. Odds are that on the first page, it'll tell you exactly what the racial mix of the school is (so parents can quickly figure out where not to send their kids).

Washington, D.C. http://profiles.dcps.dc.gov/Ballou+High+School (bottom right)

Chicago: http://www.cps.edu/Schools/Pages/school.aspx?SchoolID=610268

Baltimore: http://www.baltimorecityschools.org/cms/lib/MD01001351/Centr... (race statistics on page 1, test scores on page 3).

Philadelphia: https://webapps.philasd.org/school_profile/view/1200 (second item after "enrollment").

School choice means the prospect of black and hispanic families sending their kids to primarily white schools, and that is a non-starter in even the most liberal communities. San Francisco used to have a very progressive policy of assigning schools at random so that wealthy people couldn't congregate in one neighborhood and send their kids to the local school. Even that city had to dismantle that policy a couple of years ago.

There's a difference between demographic info being available for a school and it being on the front page of the school's site. Before clicking through your Chicago link, I tried to find a CPS school site that made demos easy to find, and came up empty. You've hotlinked to the fact sheet for a specific school to make your point, which isn't entirely fair.

I live in Oak Park, and my kids go to OPRF, which is 53/37 white/(latino|african-american). Minorities are (thankfully) overrepresented in the school. Oak Park (a/k/a/ "The People's Republic Of Oak Park") isn't conservative, and the (tiny) village is a haven for well-off white families who want to live close to the city without sending their kids to CPS schools. Lower-income families rent apartments along Austin Ave, or Section 8 houses on blocks like mine, and manage to get their kids into Oak Park schools without too much trouble.

I'm curious how things change when moving becomes a routine; i.e.: moving 5+ times whilst growing up—to the point where it becomes an expectation of the child. This was the case for me, and I notice I grew up with a much different perspective on life than those who were raised in one city or those who were transplanted just once.

Talk to any military brat. I was in 11 schools by 10th grade so I learned a whole different set of lessons from the vast majority of my "civilian" peers.

One thing I could not quite understand, is why people stay in poor area with little to no opportunities?

Some people may want to stay close to family and friends, especially when they need their support. That is understandable, but then it's their own choice, and they are probably content about it.

For those who are unhappy about their situations, why don't they just move?

It costs money to move. If you're poor, it's unlikely that you have the resources to move to a place that's better. Many poor people don't have the time to research the optimal county in which to live either. They probably have more pressing issues like this month's rent.

It's not just the cost of moving either. If you are poor your job is not likely to pay you when you aren't there, and jobs you would be looking at in the new location aren't flying you out for an interview. Chances are you'd be without any income for quite a while. Even if you aren't living completely paycheck to paycheck, that gap in time will likely eat up any money you might have put aside for rental deposits, utility hook up, etc.

Anecdotal, but, I do know people who have moved because of the promise of work elsewhere. Some wound up benefiting and turning their life around. Some wound up on the street. These people were all young with no children. As a parent, it would be very difficult for me to make the decision to move somewhere on a gamble that things would turn out ok. I'd honestly probably choose to continue to barely scrape by, but still feed my kids and keep a roof over their heads than I would gamble that we become homeless.

I'm glad I "won the life lottery" and don't have to make these kinds of choices for my family. I have a lot of compassion for those who do.

Support networks are pretty important, especially if you are financially vulnerable.

All those poor people in rural Africa just stay there. Why don't they just move?

Its got to do with being comfortable with your place in society, and feeling safe to have some position at all. Its risky to leap into a new place, with new rules.

Turn it on its head: would you move to a poor, rural area? Why not? Partly because you wouldn't know how to survive there.

Poor people in rural Africa do move... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/03/thousands-migra...

fleeing war and persecution is different than moving due to poverty.

"All those poor people in rural Africa just stay there. Why don't they just move?"

The government is also to blame in places like Africa. How can you expect to leave or even prosper when government officials, who are supposed to protect you, are nothing more than criminals?

If you've ever been poor (I don't mean "I can't afford the new iPhone" poor, but rather "I have to light candles or not flush the toilet until the 15th when I get my check" poor), then you'd know you can't move if you don't have money. Where would you move to? With what capital to move out? What about breaking your lease (which obviously you pay rent because poor people don't own anythign, you're too poor), and the financial ramifications therof? Now you're "sent to collections" and "final notice red envelope" poor, on top of everything else.

That poor.

Well, that's the kind of thinking that ties people down. In fact, if you have no credit rating then you can just hitchhike to someplace better, or catch a ride with a friend, or start walking. Right? Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

What kind of talk is that? "Just walk away"? To what, exactly? Homelessness? So, now you're poor, no job, AND homeless. That's not "the kind of thinking" that's needed, either.

Let's all agree that education is the key here, right? Bootstraps and "teaching them to fish", right? Well, how are you going to get anyone to teach in the poor areas when it's losing people to "hitchhike to someplace better"? So, the key to improving the shitty and fraud-filled situation in, say, West Virginia or Alabama, where poverty is like a 1 out of 4 situation, is to leave by foot?

You can move to Alabama if you think that's such a good idea. But I'm guessing its easier to just ask those folks to stay.

If you're young and ambitious, you can go anywhere, try anything. Tent in the state park while you interview. Visit the food bank. A poor job in a wealthy area is yards better than a poor job in a poor area. The services are better to start with.

I was unemployed and this poor for almost 2 years. Craigslist has rooms for rent in almost every major city in the US, which is very affordable. Public libraries can also provide the computers and the free high-speed Internet access (which I considered my 'office' during this time because I didn't have cable or Internet at home).

While this won't work if you have absolutely no money and no job, it's certainly an option for many people that want to get to a better area..but can't afford an apartment.

When you are poor, you need to get creative if you want to survive.

>I was unemployed and this poor for almost 2 years

How about born this poor? How about 2 generations of this poor? How about "there are no bootstraps" poor? That is 24% of Alabama and 20% of West Virginia (I always preemptively point those two out to be fair to both major American races, so that no "it's all the Black folks fault they're poor" shenanigans come out here as they do in other discussions about poverty, as West Virginia is nearly 95% white).

>While this won't work if you have absolutely no money and no job

In other words, the very definition of poverty.

So, be born with nothing, with a single mother that works 3 jobs, never sees you for more than 2 of your waking hours as you get tossed from one strange neighbor in the trailer park/projects to another, you can't concentrate on studies because teachers don't care that you're hungry at home (not at school, I know they have free lunch programs) because they get paid nothing, you share textbooks in class and can't take them home, you hear gunshots or people fighting next door or carousing all night so you can't sleep, and now you're supposed to graduate, get into college, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and get that juicy Android dev ops manager job in Silicon Valley? Or, as JoeAltmaier says, walk to a better life with rosy opportunities?

Is that how they're supposed to do it?

> One thing I could not quite understand, is why people stay in poor area with little to no opportunities?

Because moving to a new area isn't free.

> Some people may want to stay close to family and friends, especially when they need their support. That is understandable, but then it's their own choice, and they are probably content about it.

Recognizing that preserving a support network that certainly exists along with the poor conditions that certainly exists is likely the best choice available, even though moving might provide slightly better odds of material improvement but with a weaker support network in the highly-likely event of poor outcomes does not equal being content with the poor set of choices available.

> For those who are unhappy about their situations, why don't they just move?

The ones who can afford to (often because, even if poor, they have stronger or more geographically diverse support networks, or they are lucky enough to secure, rather than merely speculate on the chance of, better circumstances elsewhere before moving) do, which is one reason the places with poor opportunities go into a downward spiral.

Feel free to go into the site and search for "Northampton County, Virginia". The site points out that it's one of the worst counties in the country to be either poor or middle income. I spent a big chunk of my childhood there, and attended the horrific public schools there.

I was one of the very lucky ones, and I'm now living in an affluent suburban community, watching my son attend the kinds of schools that I'm assuming you got to attend. (I'm assuming this by your comment, which shows someone who almost certainly doesn't have a deep understanding of poverty or areas with high poverty.)

Notice that the site has a median rent listed for this county of a little over $300. Think about that: You are somebody who lives in a place with a $300 rent, which means that a given landlord, when presented with the income of the area's renters, can only fill a unit if they charge $300 a month. Yes, everyone is that poor. Work is few and far between, incomes are very low, and savings are non-existent. How can you save when you can barely get by?

So without savings, how do you finance a move to a place? How do you pay a security deposit that is, by itself, triple your current rent, plus the first month's rent, assuming you landed a job in this richer area?

The education offered sucks, period. I went to college on a scholarship, and I was completely unprepared for my classes compared to the other students. I had to work over 30 hours a week while in engineering school to pay my rent/food/books/etc, which put me at a disadvantage compared to my peers. On top of that, I didn't have the knowledge base my peers had. When I graduated high school in 1999, my school only had 4 computers with internet connections for a student body of roughly 900. This is typical of poor, rural schools. How could I have learned to program like my peers from the DC suburbs?

Your characterization that these people have made a choice to not move suggests that they ever had a choice to begin with. Most of them don't, and your comment, to people like me who had to claw ourselves out of the trap, smacks of self-righteousness and contempt.

Also, simply moving doubtfully would improve the current generation's poverty level, as they'd still be under-educated to compete with the affluent labor groups and still relegated to the same to same remedial jobs even if the parent(s) are aware moving would potentially increase their child's chances for success, potentially increasing their relative poverty.

Also, let us not underestimate the value of support networks from friends and family, living in an area may include aid for child care (grandparents/aunts/uncles/etc) and so forth.

I grow up in a poor family in China, I know what's it's like to only eat cheap food, or choose to walk instead of bus to save money. I'm not going to make comparison though, as being poor in China is probably very different from being poor in America.

I've also met a fare share of poor people here in Canada. And most of them choose to be so, by choosing work in arts and music, spending money on parties and drinks, or not follow the worker bee lifestyle and work as little as possible. I don't look down upon them, as they seem to enjoy their chosen lifestyles. Although I have a feeling that the poor you are talking about might be different from what I see.

I've also met many poor immigrants who are not as fortunate as I am, working as taxi drivers, manual labours and/or minimum wage jobs. But most of them don't seem to be seriously stuck, as in that they could afford to move to a different city if there is no job locally.

So I'm sorry that my question smacks contempt, which is half-true (for people who don't work hard and blame others for their misfortunes). But I am also ignorant about what it's like to be poor in America. Is it really that much worse than Canada?

For the poor, the United States is a far, far worse place to live than Canada.

Canada has a comparatively large welfare state, and far better public schools. In the United States, public schools receive the majority of their funding from the local town/county taxes. This means that a poor person who lives in a poor area will attend a bad school.

I could go on, but take a look at the data. On basically any metric, the US is a much worse place to be poor than Canada.

> In the United States, public schools receive the majority of their funding from the local town/county taxes. This means that a poor person who lives in a poor area will attend a bad school.

The conclusion is true, but the reason given is not true in many parts of the United States: e.g., California (and I don't think California is the only state with similar rules) requires equal per-pupil public spending statewide, so difference in local tax bases within the state do not affect spending (but schools in poor areas have unique challenges that increase costs, and often get less additional support from outside sources to supplement their equalized funding, so they still end up disadvantaged.)

There was such an emperor in China in A.D. 209~307. The country was suffering a devastating famine one year, and a large number of people starved to death. When the emperor was reported the news that people had no rice, no wheat, no millet, to feed themselves and starved to death, he asked, "why don't they eat meat?".

Are you serious? That's the most ignorant thing I've heard in a while.

When you're too poor to fill your gas tank, how do you afford to move across country to an area with more opportunity?

When you're living with room mates, and still barely able to make your rent, how do you get a new place some where else?

Obviously you're not poor, but don't stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not a problem. If it were that easy to fix being poor, it would have been solved ages ago.

Looking at some semi-rural areas where I have family and there isn't much opportunity this looks like it is strongly correlated with whiteness, which makes me wonder how much of this is a matter of minorities having less economic mobility.

    They have elementary schools with higher test scores, a higher share of two-
    parent families, greater levels of involvement in civic and religious groups
    and more residential integration of affluent, middle-class and poor families.

While income inequality may appear influenced by race, it's empirically shown to be cultural, predicated on whether individuals believe they have control over their lives and are responsible for their actions. Culture often masquerades as race, but is easy to distinguish: Are members of the same race who grew up with a different set of values as successful as members of other races with those same values?

The acts of those in Baltimore may feel justified, but they are only feeding the culture that contributes to their lack of upward mobility.

Austin is considered one of the worst neighborhoods to raise kids? That doesn't seem right. It is one of the most affluent cities in Texas.

The article's interactive map has a misleading caption: "The Best and Worst Places to Grow Up ..." The map is based on the upward mobility of children from poor families, not all children.

The article's map doesn't have enough resolution to separate Austin from the surrounding areas well. Although downtown Austin is in Travis county, the county is over 1000 square miles in size. The top rated Austin school district is very very good and is only 31 square miles out of the 1000. Furthermore, the Austin area includes Williamson county too and there are several additional good school districts with schools in Williamson county as well. Westlake High School, located in the Austin area, is ranked by Newsweek at 117 among all public high schools nationally and an admission based magnet school in the Austin Independent School District is number 8 in the same ranking.

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