(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
This story was originally published by Iowa Capital Dispatch and is unaltered.
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Policymakers miss Iowa’s persistently poor neighborhoods [1]
['More From Author', 'July', 'Ed Tibbetts']
Date: 2023-07-17
In Iowa, when we talk about economic decline these days, it’s mostly about farm country.
There’s a good reason for that. The population of rural Iowa is shrinking. Main streets are struggling. Young people are leaving because they can’t find jobs.
Five years ago, Gov. Kim Reynolds created a task force to empower rural parts of the state. The Legislature has devoted significant resources to the effort, too.
But when it comes to the most persistent pockets of high poverty in the state, you won’t find them in rural Iowa; instead, they’re found in Iowa’s urban communities — in places like Waterloo, Des Moines and Davenport.
Need proof?
A recent U.S. Census Bureau report found that not a single one of Iowa’s 99 counties met the definition of “persistent poverty,” meaning a place where the poverty rate has been at least 20% for 30 years (between 1989 and 2019). But when government statisticians drilled down to census tracts – more localized areas with populations of between 1,200 and 8,000 people – they found 39 in Iowa that met the criteria.
Nearly 110,000 Iowans live in these places.
The good news is Iowa had a smaller share of its population (3.6%) living in these persistent poverty tracts than most states.
But it’s not an insignificant number. If all 110,000 of these people lived in one county, it would be the sixth largest in Iowa.
In many cases, like Davenport, these historically impoverished areas are located in or near central cities, far away from the neighborhoods where growth is occurring. In other words, they’re neighborhoods some people never see.
In Davenport, these persistent poverty tracts extend from Division Street on the west side to Bridge Avenue on the east, running south from roughly 12th Street to the Mississippi River.
These are some of the oldest parts of Davenport.
In government parlance, they’re census tracts 106, 107, 108 and 109.
These neighborhoods are old, they’re shrinking in population, and they’re disproportionately Black.
There are pockets of growth and revitalization in some of these areas, particularly downtown, but it’s limited. For 30 years, these neighborhoods have experienced poverty rates that significantly exceed the rate for Scott County as a whole; sometimes, by twice as much.
(In the second part of this report, coming this week on Along the Mississippi, I will focus more on Davenport’s persistent poverty tracts.)
Who gets blamed for poverty?
How we talk about poverty in Iowa depends a lot on where the poor live, according to academics and experts I consulted.
Colin Gordon, a history professor at the University of Iowa, says there is a tendency to talk about rural poverty as something attached to a place. But the kind of poverty that exists in cities, like in these persistent poverty tracts, is attached to — and blamed on — people.
An assumption, Gordon says, is that people living in these urban areas have more economic options than those in rural areas, so if they don’t have a job, it’s their problem.
“You see this in the history of economic development in Iowa, of a lot of attention to rural opportunity zones or the equivalent,” Gordon says. “Even though I think it’s very misplaced policy, this accounts for a lot of the money thrown at things like ethanol plants.”
In larger cities, however, there are barriers to finding work, like transportation gaps. The availability of childcare also is a problem.
Gordon says that people who live in these persistently poor neighborhoods also suffer because of the “accumulation of disadvantage,” like lack of access to good jobs, educational opportunities, health care and the like.
“The circumstances can be overwhelming,” he says.
He adds that investments, principally in public schools, are important in these areas, as is putting funding into well-targeted economic development programs that create good-paying jobs there.
Advocates for the poor and middle class say that anti-poverty investments in these areas — as well as in other parts of the state — aren’t sufficient in Iowa, even though the state’s general fund surplus for fiscal year 2024 is expected to exceed $2 billion.
Lawmakers have kept a lid on spending, even as they’ve cut taxes, with most of the money going to the wealthy.
During the last session, the Legislature approved a budget that only spends 88% of revenues, according to most major media outlets. The legal limit is 99%.
The organization Common Good Iowa says the Legislature is being even more stingy. Actual spending is 82%, the group says. “There’s a lot of money on the table that the state could be using to support these areas, and I think it should get creative,” Sean Finn, a policy analyst at Common Good Iowa, says.
Some federal policies shortchange persistent poverty areas
There also are practices at the federal level that shortchange these smaller persistent poverty areas in favor of rural counties.
A provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 directed that a handful of USDA programs send 10% of its funds to persistent poverty counties. It was a unique approach at the time, aimed at helping poor areas, notably in the South. Since then, the idea has been expanded beyond rural development programs to other parts of the federal budget, according to a Congressional Research Service report, which focused on how such areas are defined.
However, what the Census Bureau report makes clear is that directing these federal funds only at persistent poverty counties means a lot of poor neighborhoods are being missed.
The report said that nationwide 9.1 million more people were living in persistent poverty census tracts than in persistent poverty counties.
That’s a lot of people who aren’t on policymakers’ maps.
Finn notes that some of these persistent poverty areas in Iowa correspond with neighborhoods where Black people have suffered from racist policies, such as those in the 1930s and beyond that restricted their access to home ownership financing.
Home ownership, he notes, is the main way to build wealth.
“Iowa needs to invest in these areas of persistent poverty,” he says. “Perhaps this looks like economic development funds, low- or no-interest loan programs for historically oppressed populations, or direct payments to those whose families were affected by Iowa’s racist laws.”
David Peters, a professor of rural sociology at Iowa State University, says he wasn’t surprised at the lack of persistent poverty counties in Iowa. The Upper Midwest, he says, doesn’t have the kind of broad-based structural characteristics — like lower education levels and economic barriers — that exist in the South and in Appalachia, where there are more impoverished counties.
He also cautions that some of Iowa’s persistent poverty areas include “temporary poor” like college students — or ex-prisoners living in transitional housing.
(The Census Bureau did exclude group quarters like prisons, jails and nursing homes from its report.)
Peters says it’s difficult to effectively aim resources at impoverished places, especially in Iowa, where poverty is more localized.
Grants and loans aimed at creating jobs may go to urban areas. But Peters says jobs that are created in poor areas often get nabbed up by people who don’t live there or who aren’t poor. Also, the money going to downtowns and adjacent commercial districts may be used to make improvements to the area, but they aren’t adequately focused on poor people, he adds.
Still, policymakers shouldn’t ignore these areas, Peters said. Local leaders, in particular, should, at the least, try to understand what it means to be poor in these areas, he said. “Is it a discrimination issue? Is it an education issue? Do the people living in these tracts have some sort of either criminal record, or drug addiction issues or mental health issues? It would be interesting to know.”
I was surprised when I saw this Census Bureau report.
We spend a lot of time in Iowa talking about rural decline, but not about high poverty urban areas.
I grew up in a small town in Iowa, and I’m pained to see how much has changed in rural parts of the state.
The governor’s rural task force is needed, as are investments like the nearly $150 million in federal money for broadband, which recently was made available through the state’s rural broadband grant program. However, as a Davenport resident for 30-plus years, I also see up close these urban areas where high levels of poverty have existed for decades.
These places need the attention of policymakers, too.
With the surplus the state maintains, this isn’t a problem that should be ignored, even if there are challenges to getting help into the hands of the people who need it the most.
Meanwhile, our congressional representatives also should take a closer look at ensuring federal funding aimed at persistently poor areas across the country doesn’t just stop at the county line. If it does, then tens of thousands of Iowans will continue to get shortchanged.
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