A few months prior to my 20th birthday, as I was waiting and hoping that my younger brother would wake up from his cancer-induced coma, I found out I had been accepted at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.

Since age 16, I had been working at a Giant Eagle to help support my family. Neither of my parents had bachelor’s degrees and there were zero expectations in my house that I’d go to college. I figured that if I didn’t go to college soon, I’d never get the hell out of that stock room and away from the chronic back pain it inflicted. I had applied to the only two colleges I knew anything about, WJU (now Wheeling University) and the later-discredited Art Institute of Pittsburgh, intending to enroll at whichever accepted me first, if either of them did.

I had missed nearly 115 days in high school, some of which were due to an emergency medical condition greatly worsened by doctors’ refusal to listen to my mum or me, resulting in an amputation. Other times I skipped because of how I was treated at school. I’d been tardy nearly 95 times, had countless detentions, and graduated with a 2.07 GPA and a 470 on my SAT.

A school staff member used to tell me that my “kind of people don’t go to college” and most of my peers at my suburban, Catholic high school either ignored me completely, called me and my family “poor white trash,” or mocked my appearance and heavy Pittsburgh accent. All throughout high-school, I was called lazy, stupid and ignorant by other students and even by several teachers. When I showed up for school, I’d sometimes deal with it by sneaking a swig of booze or popping Valiums that my mum gave me.

Fifteen years after that acceptance letter from WJU came through, I’m a data analyst, dedicated to understanding and addressing poverty, segregation, affordable housing and community violence.

On the way, I’ve developed a clear understanding that white poverty tends not to come with the additional, deep racism-based challenges that often come with Black poverty – though white poverty can be similarly grinding in places like rural Appalachia, the deep rural South and parts of the Rust Belt. But that understanding didn’t happen overnight. I’ve learned that while racial disparities are stark on their own, they’re often intertwined with class and other identities. 

Given this, when policymakers work to address challenges like poverty, they must be aware of the ways race, class, gender and other identities intersect so that they can tailor solutions to address the different challenges that tend to be experienced by different groups — including low-income white people.

A poor kid’s response to ‘white privilege’

My parents moved us from Carrick to Brookline when I was little, in hopes of keeping us away from gun violence. They sacrificed what little money they had, “robbed Peter to pay Paul,” and had us kids write letters pleading for financial aid to the Catholic bishop of Pittsburgh to attend Seton La Salle High School in Mount Lebanon. They wanted us to be safe and get a Catholic education, and had concerns about us going to Brashear High, which was Brookline’s Pittsburgh Public Schools feeder school.

Still, I didn’t always feel very safe at Seton or in my own home during much of high school. My parents did, and do, many loving things for me but also repeated the cycles of abuse they themselves were exposed to. Outside of the bullying and isolation at school, I was exposed to significant trauma in my home. As a result, our house was frequently visited by police. 

Police also had a tendency for following me around stores and harassing me. Once, an officer even kicked in a stall door that bashed into my head when someone falsely accused me of doing drugs in a carnival bathroom.

When the time came to start at WJU, my Pell Grant and other financial aid left a few thousand in tuition to pay. Around the same time, my dad lost his job and never regained full-time employment. We only hung on to the house because of Obama’s unemployment extension, my mum’s disability and my younger brother’s Supplemental Security Income from having cancer. But they didn’t have anything to help me, so I asked the priest who baptized me at the now-closed Saint Canice in Knoxville to lend me the money, and he did. My dad and brother dropped me off at WJU with a single pillow, my guitar and one backpack full of clothes.

Adapting to being a college student was hard at first. I spent the first few weeks trying to collect unemployment from the just-closed Giant Eagle where I had worked, and hearing about the problems at home on my flip phone. Academically, I didn’t know what paragraph breaks were, so my first submitted essay was a single wall of text. I went through college without a computer. 

But I made lifelong friends immediately. The son of an unemployed electrician, I felt included among classmates who were the sons and daughters of coal miners and tradesmen. Many of the professors were from Appalachia and cared deeply about first-generation college students. I had a bed again (my mattress at home got maggots, so I’d been sleeping on the floor) and a meal plan, which meant I didn’t have to worry about food stamps running out or having to steal food from Giant Eagle to eat lunch.

Given my life experiences and how hard (and lucky) my road to college was, when a middle-class white student in my psychology class said something like, “white people don’t experience real poverty,” I pushed back. And when they then told me to “check my white privilege,” I could barely keep from blurting out: “What the fuck did you just say?” Comments like that initially made me allergic to conversations about privilege.

Blaming poor people for poverty

I was slightly above, at or below the poverty line from birth until age 29, so my understanding of the advantages of being white came slowly and through meaningful exposure to people with different perspectives and life experiences.

It came through self-reflection on what I’d seen in my own life, a growing understanding of what many of my poor Black peers faced, and, importantly, an intersectional and non-shame-based approach to conversations about privilege and the history of discrimination in the United States. 

This all culminated in a major belief change in 2014, when I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” which affected me because it was coming from a Black man who grew up poor and reflected data, plus experiences, that connected with mine. 

Building off much of the existing research cited in Coates’ essay, Opportunity Insights of Harvard released a landmark study on race and income mobility. It found that when accounting for race, class and gender, poor Black and Indigenous Americans had significantly lower average incomes in adulthood when compared to their poor white and Asian peers, and poor Latinos fell somewhere in the middle.

While the study shows that lower-income people of all races tend to do worse than their peers of the same race who did not grow up in poverty, it also makes clear that class alone doesn’t explain gaps between the outcomes of poor children of different races. The study proposed two primary factors: racial bias against Black people and the neighborhood context in which low-income Black children tend to grow up. 

Here in Allegheny County, 73% of poor Black families reside in our higher need census tracts, along with 22% of poor white families and 14% of poor Asian families. Poor white and Asian families mostly reside in lower-need working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, unlike their poor Black peers.

As I wrote in a previous essay for PublicSource, our neighborhoods look the way they do because of the causes (structural racism) and consequences of persistent racial and economic segregation, in addition to the massive impact of deindustrialization. While I grew up poor, I did so primarily in a low-poverty, working-class, relatively safe neighborhood. Most of my poor Black peers are disproportionately exposed to concentrated poverty and gun violence and I strongly argue we cannot ignore them. Exposure to gun violence may be one of the most important factors that explain why neighborhoods matter in affecting life outcomes.

Despite being low-income, and after moving us from rental to rental, my parents were able to get a mortgage for our house in Brookline, an easier lift because they are white. Government programs kept the family afloat. Additionally, attending a college like WJU and meeting mentors there who held me to high expectations and supported me undeniably helped me eventually rise out of poverty. While the classism I faced throughout middle and high school was challenging (and would have been even harder if I was poor and Black), getting to attend a low-poverty school was still of huge benefit to my social mobility. 

While it took tremendous efforts to go from lifelong poverty to middle-class researcher, I rose out of poverty not because I worked any harder or was any smarter than poor peers, but because I was exposed to enough protective factors and got lucky at various points in my life.

With all this context in mind, I still think it’s important to talk about and understand white poverty in its own right and in a way that doesn’t invalidate and dismiss its challenges, especially in the current political reality. 

In my experience, politicians on the political right — from former poor people like Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance to generationally wealthy people like Donald Trump — tend to exploit poor white people when they are politically useful, but otherwise demonize them and do little to address poverty. And people on the political left tend to acknowledge the systemic drivers of poverty for every marginalized group except poor white people, but at least they tend to support the social safety net more broadly. 

Recent research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that social liberals, when prompted to reflect on white privilege, had reduced sympathy for poor white people and were more likely to blame them over external causes for their challenges. Liberals showed higher levels of sympathy for other poor groups. On the other hand, conservatives expressed low levels of sympathy for all low-income people. My experience is that neither political conservatives nor liberals tend to look at the very real external causes of white poverty. They blame poor white people for supposed personal failures.

Addressing learned biases and better understanding privilege, call for an intersectional approach that acknowledges how different, intersecting identities shape our experiences and outcomes. If a conversation or research study doesn’t minimally include the intersecting realities of race, class and gender, then that conversation or research is insufficient and incomplete. Just as poor Black people tend to experience additional hardships to those experienced by upper-income Black people, being poor and white is incredibly distinct from being upper income and white, so looking at race alone is not enough.

There also is a lack of understanding of the volume of white people who experience poverty. Here in Allegheny County, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the white poverty rate in 2022 was 8% and the Black poverty rate was 31%, which reflects the realities of structural racism. At the same time, there are more poor white people in the county than any other group: more than 73,000 poor white people and around 43,000 poor Black people. Nationally, most poor people are white, with over 17 million white, non-Hispanic people living in poverty. 

Policymakers have to understand the full scope of poverty and how it intersects with race to properly address disparities across groups and serve all those in need. 

Closely intertwined with the enduring reality of racism in America is the enduring reality of classism, reflected in the slur “white trash.” As documented in Nancy Isenberg’s book “White Trash,” people coming to the New World from England during the colonial era weren’t primarily escaping religious persecution and the monarchy, but rather shipped over because British elites saw America as a trash bin for England’s poor when starvation, incarceration or war didn’t dispose of them.

Surrounded by populations of white people brought over as indentured servants and Black people transported into slavery, wealthy whites, terrified of a united rebellion, have exploited the construct of race to divide and control poor people since the colonial era. According to Isenberg, the general landlessness of America’s white rural poor, meanwhile, led to a series of slurs that are still openly used to this day: waste people, redneck, hillbilly, white trash, clay eater, cracker and trailer trash, as just some common examples. Given how often I still hear them used, they seem to be considered acceptable, even on the political left. 

Throughout America’s history, poverty has been wrongly viewed as hereditary, not the result of structural barriers. As part of the eugenics movement of the early 1900s, forced sterilization was used to control “undesirable” populations, which included women of color and poor white women. And while discriminatory voting, housing, lending and land use laws throughout U.S history took clear aims at disenfranchising Black people, they also impact poor people of any race, though not equally.

Such thinking has seeped into political discourse on all sides, with poor white people viewed as part of a group of deplorables. Even today, most of the discourse on the 2016 election results blames poor and working class white people for the election of Donald Trump, even though exit polls show he was mostly elected by middle- and upper-income white people.

Statistical truths, individual experiences

In 2022, West Virginia — where my classmate had denied white poverty — was 90% white and the third-poorest state. Its second-poorest county, McDowell, is 90% white and has the state’s highest suicide rate, America’s highest opioid overdose rate among counties according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the nation’s lowest county life expectancy, the latter statistic on par with Iraq. 

Here in Allegheny County, most Black people live in our higher-need neighborhoods, which is not true of any other racial or ethnic group. At the same time, there are nearly as many white people in our higher-need neighborhoods as Black people — around 76,000 white people and around 82,000 Black people. While need is most concentrated in our Black neighborhoods,  there is also high need in mixed-but-majority-white neighborhoods in Pittsburgh’s South Hilltop, McKees Rocks and steel towns throughout the Mon Valley. These are neighborhoods where low-to-moderate-income people of different races are exposed to challenges like gun violence,  pollution, economic isolation, food deserts, transportation barriers and more, a fact that may get overlooked. 

I was poor or near poor from birth until about six years ago, when I landed my career as a researcher after graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College (an aggressive culture shock for me given that two-thirds of students come from the top fifth of the income distribution). Despite my own economic mobility, the consequences of poverty and trauma still impact me to this day. I also have had to deal with years of people invalidating my experiences or demonstrating a lack of empathy toward poor white people. 

This approach didn’t work in teaching me about the reality of racism, and it doesn’t help build coalitions across race and class to abolish structural racism, classism and other forms of discrimination. But exposure to intersectionality and approaches that combine empathetic listening with highlighting our shared humanity did and do work, and as a result, I’ve dedicated my adult life to addressing the causes and consequences of persistent racial and economic segregation.

We need to recognize and separate statistical truths from individual ones. One should never assume what someone’s life experience is without getting to know them. Individual experiences can and do stray from statistical averages. If someone has a bias or a lack of understanding about how intersecting identities tend to shape outcomes, we should educate in a way that acknowledges these identities and expose people to these ideas in ways that are effective, not confrontational.

We should care about eradicating poverty for people of all races, with an understanding that individuals from different groups tend to require different levels of support, given the reality of structural discrimination. To do that, we need diverse anti-poverty coalitions across race and class, not silos. 

Nick Cotter is a researcher with Allegheny County and the creator of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. He can be reached at pittsburghneighborhoodproject@gmail.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone. This piece does not reflect official views of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. You can follow the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project here.

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When I worked as a caseworker for a local nonprofit here in Pittsburgh, every spring, I saw the same thing happen year after year. As soon as the winter utility moratorium lifted, we would have a surge in requests for utility assistance to prevent shut-offs. Often, utility bills were so large that we couldn’t realistically help most of the families who applied. For reasons of funding scarcity, we had to instill a strict policy aimed at helping only those whose utility bills were low enough to be helped, and avoided paying down utility bills that were likely to be shut off anyway (bills that were in the thousands).

Of those families we could actually help, they were often forced to choose between letting the gas get shut off and keeping the power on because they “didn’t need the gas again until winter” and Pittsburgh’s sweltering humidity was right around the corner. For too many of these families, access to running water was negotiable and access to running water should never be negotiable.

Now, factor in the coronavirus pandemic. The health, social and economic consequences of the novel coronavirus — especially for Pittsburgh’s region’s most vulnerable — are potentially devastating, but they don’t have to be. And there are already measures in the making.

Federal, state and local governments have, or are in the process of, addressing utility, housing, health and income stability through a number of temporary policy measures to delay the spread of COVID-19 and keep our healthcare system below capacity. To name several local actions directly, a few local utility companies have extended and expanded moratoriums on utility shut-offs. City Councilor Deb Gross will introduce a Will of Council on Tuesday calling on a) remaining utility companies to enact temporary moratoriums on utility shut-offs and b) the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Office and the Pennsylvania Courts to place a moratorium on evictions, residential foreclosures and tax liens on residential property. Likewise, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh has placed its own moratorium on evictions, pending issues of safety.

At the federal level, the U.S. House passed a bipartisan legislative package with paid emergency leave, extended family and medical leave, free testing for COVID-19 and expanded funding for Medicaid, as to provide state governments with the resources required to combat the pandemic. President Trump supports the package, although the bill has exemptions for employers with more than 500 people. Pittsburgh recently guaranteed that all employees working in city limits get paid sick leave from their employer. The U.S Department of Labor also expanded unemployment benefits to workers affected by COVID-19.

While all of these measures are commendable, federal shortcomings aside, I have yet to hear local, state or federal officials talk about what happens when the spread of the virus is eventually under control. I realize it might be overwhelming to think of what’s next given where we are now but I believe it’s necessary given the following concerns, assuming proposed moratoriums are enacted:

What happens when moratoriums on evictions are lifted and low- to moderate-income households are faced with their current rent and at least one or more months of back rent?

What happens when moratoriums on foreclosures are lifted and low- to moderate-income homeowners are faced with their current mortgage payment and at least one or more months of mortgage payments?

What happens when moratoriums on utilities are lifted and families are left in the dark when lights are shut off, or when low-income families can’t bathe their children when water faucets run dry?

What happens when our current provisions under unemployment insurance end and markets still haven’t recovered from the severe economic tremors we are about to face as a result of business closures and layoffs?

According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, nearly a third of American households were cost burdened by rent as of 2017. Given this fact, accompanied by our national affordable housing crisis caused by ever-rising utility and housing costs, stagnant wages and a decline in federal funding for affordable housing programs, Allegheny County and localities all over the country could be facing two major crises when the pandemic of COVID-19 is under control (and after moratoriums are lifted): mass evictions and mass utility shut-offs.

These problems aren’t new. Annual spikes in utility shut-offs and homelessness and housing instability, in general, are the result of our systemic failure to provide a fully comprehensive and exhaustive social safety net for the poor, working class and for the most vulnerable among us. We will face these same issues when our temporary policy measures to ensure stability during the outbreak are lifted but at a scale that may be hard to imagine.

Local, state and federal lawmakers must act now to place a moratorium on evictions, housing foreclosures and utility shut-offs, and provide low- to moderate-income households with the necessary resources to meet their basic needs.

Local, state and federal lawmakers must create assistance funds to help low- to moderate-income families pay down back rent, mortgage and utility bills, as to prevent the mass evictions, housing foreclosures and mass utility shut-offs that could occur once moratoriums (if hopefully enacted) are eventually lifted.

Lawmakers could also explore changes to unemployment benefits that cover all of lost income, not just a portion of it, and extend how long individuals can receive unemployment benefits. Or, federal lawmakers could divert funding toward an emergency and prolonged unconditional cash transfer (a kind of universal basic income)  for low- to moderate-income households, as to allow households to not fall behind on rent and utility bills in the first place.

Public health officials are encouraging lawmakers to take drastic action now to delay the spread of the virus, to prevent spikes that will otherwise overwhelm our hospital systems. Likewise, the actions lawmakers take now to plan for the post-COVID-19 outbreak could prevent eviction courts, city and county services and nonprofits from being completely overwhelmed in the coming months. Social service agencies could face huge influxes as vulnerable households unable to pay down utility bills, rent or mortgages seek assistance regarding the possibility of no utilities or even eviction and homelessness. Utility shut-offs and eviction notices (even when the rent owed is paid down) affect people’s credit and eviction histories, which impact everything from landlords who will rent to you and what you can borrow.

Whatever the mechanism, lawmakers need to start planning for these possibilities now. We can’t stop one crisis only to enter another.

***

Precautions the author is taking:

As a result of the coronavirus outbreak, my family and I have taken extreme measures to protect vulnerable family members. My mom has COPD, congestive heart failure, diabetes, asthma and has been on oxygen 24/7 for several years now. My dad had major heart surgery a few years back and has diabetes. Both of them are over 60. If either of them became infected, it could be fatal. My brother moved into my small apartment to isolate himself from my parents like I and the rest of my siblings have. We haven’t physically interacted with them for more than a week. My mom and dad have agreed to stay inside indefinitely, and my siblings and I are getting all of their groceries and prescriptions (and dropping them off on their front porch).

One of my siblings has been forced to choose between losing income and not possibly infecting others (should they be a carrier). I help financially support several family members, and the virus has put a greater strain on my ability to do that. All of my immediate family members are only going outside for walks or exercise (with social distance) but otherwise are not attending anything, from religious services to therapy. Lastly, I also struggle with a chronic illness and am self-isolating to keep myself from dealing with even more than I already am. This virus could kill people like my parents and best friend who has cystic fibrosis. Please adopt all of the measures proposed by lawmakers and public health officials to delay the spread of this virus. And I’m lucky enough to work remotely and have an apartment to follow said measures. Others aren’t so lucky, and we must make sure they have the resources to follow guidelines.

***

Nick Cotter is a researcher with Allegheny County and the creator of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. He can be reached at pittsburghneighborhoodproject@gmail.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone. This piece does not reflect official views of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. You can follow the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project on Twitter @ThePittsburghNP.

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I grew up in a low-income, complicated household on a cobblestone street in Brookline. During the early years of my life, my family and I jumped between rentals in the Hilltop and South Pittsburgh. When I was roughly 8 years old, my parents bought their home in the middle of that cobblestone hill.

My mom also grew up in a poor, complicated household on Rochelle Street in Knoxville. She lived there from the 1950s until she married in the 80s. Her mother was widowed shortly after she was born. Her uncle, who moved in with my grandmother to help raise my mother and her siblings, worked in the steel mills until the day they shut down.

My dad, on the other hand, was born into an upper-income family and was raised in a large home off Tennyson Avenue in North Oakland. By the time my dad met my mom, his family had suffered numerous tragedies, including the murder of his father, that resulted in the loss of that family wealth.

I tell you these stories because the neighborhoods where we grow up matter far more than most of us probably believe. While I grew up poor, experienced significant abuse and lived in a house where neither parent had a college degree, I am white and got to grow up in a low-poverty, working-class neighborhood like Brookline. The lowest poverty neighborhoods are typically defined as those with less than 10% of their population living below the federal poverty line, and Brookline has been roughly low-poverty for the past 27 years.

In contrast, most black children in Pittsburgh don’t get to grow up in low-poverty neighborhoods, even when the data is controlled for income.

About 14% of poor white people in Pittsburgh lived in high-poverty neighborhoods (those with 30% poverty or more), but a staggering 59% of poor black people did, according to an analysis I completed using data from 2017 American Community Survey estimates.[1] These trends are alarming. More and more academic research links childhood development in high-poverty neighborhoods to negative long-term socio-economic and health-based adult outcomes.

For example, in Stuck in Place, sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton University showed that growing up in concentrated poverty is linked to generational poverty and impairs verbal and cognitive development. Children raised in high-poverty neighborhoods who were born to parents raised in high-poverty neighborhoods saw a reduction of 8 or 9 points on the standard IQ scale, equivalent to missing two to four years of schooling. Economist Raj Chetty of Harvard University reanalyzed income data for families in the federally funded Moving to Opportunity experiment and found that a childhood move from a high- to low-poverty area had a significant positive effect on adult earnings.

Although violent crime was at an all-time low in 2014 and has dropped by more than half in many urban centers since the 1990s, crime is still disproportionately higher in high-poverty communities, according to Sharkey in The Great Crime Decline. In Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson found that concentrated poverty has a strong relationship with violent crime; he also found that violent crime tends to have a strong relationship with a host of negative community level health measures. One natural experiment by Sharkey found that child IQ scores were 7 to 8 points below the average if there was a murder in that child’s neighborhood within a week of their taking an IQ test.

I started the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project in early 2019 to examine lasting economic and racial segregation in Pittsburgh neighborhoods. The project includes a mix of data analysis, resident interviews and street-by-street walks of all 90 neighborhoods in the city. My goal is to educate Pittsburghers, policymakers and relevant stakeholders on the reality of lasting segregation and concentrated poverty, as well as the need for people- and place-based policies that more equitably distribute resources, opportunity, and investment to our most disadvantaged neighborhoods and residents.

On the other end of the spectrum, several areas in Pittsburgh are experiencing rapid residential demand and rising rents. Affordable housing and wage policies must be enacted to ensure that longtime residents benefit from investment, improved access and opportunity. However, most of Pittsburgh’s poor and black neighborhoods aren’t dramatically changing. Instead, they are overwhelmingly poor, isolated and disadvantaged.

I want to challenge assumptions about certain neighborhoods because our most disadvantaged neighborhoods are still filled with beautiful things and wonderful people. So far, I’ve completed profiles for Manchester, Knoxville, Garfield, Brookline and California-Kirkbride.

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know the city intimately since I was a kid. My dad did electrical work for over 40 years and still points out the houses he’s worked on. I joined him on jobs in wealthy, working-class and poor neighborhoods alike, and these experiences showed the stark conditions that existed between neighborhoods. As a child, I remember being astounded at the abandonment and visceral poverty in Garfield compared to affluent Friendship, its immediate neighbor below Penn Avenue.

The contrast also reminds me of the differences between Knoxville and Brookline. My grandma, cousins and uncle lived on Rochelle Street, and I fondly remember gram’s rigatonis and the sweet smell of the long-closed Angelo’s Pizza. But I also remember hearing gunshots, and often wondering if my cousins were scared like I was. Brookline rarely had shootings, and I had the privilege of feeling safe on Brookline’s streets. Likewise, Brookline was and is home to a thriving business district that can sponsor a wealth of local community and sports organizations for kids.

The stark differences I saw between communities as a child are still there today, with few exceptions. While national outlets have praised Pittsburgh’s economic transition from a former steel hub to a multifaceted research, health and tech economy, that revitalization has done little to benefit low-skilled workers in the region and the neighborhoods they tend to reside in; studies show that economic growth does not tend to lead to social mobility for low-income individuals.

This is especially true for Pittsburgh’s majority black communities, because race is something that cannot be separated from discussions of concentrated poverty and housing policy.

Increasing suburbanization and white flight emptied out city neighborhoods across the nation after World War II. Deindustrialization disproportionately affected black people and delivered another blow to poor neighborhoods of color, according to renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged.

Additionally, as detailed by Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute in the Color of Law, government-led discriminatory housing practices and discriminatory lending policies that locked out black homeowners (and those who would sell to black people) worked to concentrate black residents in the poorest communities in Pittsburgh and cities across the nation. Racial discrimination was legal until the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

However, research shows that the federal law has done little to change the percentage of black children living in high-poverty areas. As Sharkey also showed in Stuck in Place, from 1955 to 1970, 29% of African American children lived in high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States; this figure increased to 31% from 1985 to 2000. In contrast, only 1% of white children grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods in the United States over both periods.

My street interviews with neighborhood residents showcase the variation in experience between black and white residents.

A black woman in Garfield told me that she loves her neighborhood now that investment, commercial activity and people have started to return. She told me that “most of the white people left,” but that some were coming back as of late. She recalled the decades of intense violence and gang activity that hit her neighborhood hard.

Prolonged poverty, lack of opportunity, the emergence of crack cocaine in the 80s and disproportionately high neighborhood violence were realities that she had to contend with as a kid. And despite her pride in Garfield, she wished that there were more businesses for her and her kids. She can’t “eat art.”

A woman I spoke to off Suncrest Street in Knoxville conveyed the challenge of being black in Pittsburgh and how she doesn’t feel safe around the police.  She told me of the multitude of times she’s been harassed by the police just for walking home from work. And she recounted the death of Jonny Gammage at the hands of police in the South Hills suburb of Brentwood. For black Pittsburghers, fear is a reality of life, whether that fear is due to neighborhood violence stemming from extreme poverty and segregation or the reality of police brutality and harassment.

Pittsburgh is a tale of two cities: one where most of its white residents tend to live in low-poverty communities and one where most of its black residents tend to live in high-poverty ones. According to 2017 census estimates that I analyzed, roughly 68% of Pittsburgh neighborhoods were majority white, about 23% were majority black and nearly 9% were racially mixed with no one race holding a simple majority. According to the data, about 88% of neighborhoods with poverty rates upward of 40% were mostly inhabited by black residents. The remaining neighborhoods were racially mixed.

Additionally, 100% of neighborhoods with the lowest poverty were overwhelmingly inhabited by white residents, with less than 10% of residents living below the federal poverty line. Only three out of 17 majority-black areas had a poverty rate of less than 20%: Manchester, East Liberty and the Upper Hill. But 34 out of 50 majority-white neighborhoods experienced rates below 20%.[2]

[3]

Most of these poor neighborhoods have been poor for decades. Pittsburgh’s industries and population imploded in the decades before 1990, and many of its neighborhoods haven’t changed much since then.

Neighborhood poverty in 1990 has a strong linear relationship with poverty in 2017, according to my regression analysis. With few exceptions, high-poverty neighborhoods stayed poor. Neighborhoods that were slightly better off financially, but still undeniably poor, either remained within their class or experienced further poverty. The city’s more affluent communities, on the other hand, barely budged over nearly three decades.

[4]

I faced significant challenges living below the federal poverty line while growing up, and I currently deal with significant health issues that are the result of that long-term poverty and abuse.

But I did move beyond my parents. And while I had to worry about trauma and instability in my home, I didn’t have to worry about them in my neighborhood. My relationship with my parents is incredibly complicated, but they did ensure I had the resources to succeed both economically and occupationally. They were able to move me to a low-poverty neighborhood early on, put me in Catholic school with what little money they had left (and with the aid of financial scholarships), get me in neighborhood groups like the Boy Scouts and baseball, and allow me to grow creatively by letting my feet hit the large playground that was Brookline.

The neighborhoods where we grow up matter in the long term. Growing up in a low-income household presents enough challenges for health and social mobility, but growing up poor in a poor neighborhood offers challenges that most poor whites in metro areas will never have to face. What we aren’t exposed to as kids is just as important as what we are exposed to.

Nick Cotter is a researcher with Allegheny County and the creator of the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. He can be reached at pittsburghneighborhoodproject@gmail.com. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone. This piece does not reflect official views of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. You can follow the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project on Twitter @ThePittsburghN1.

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About the data

1. Analysis used American Community Survey 5-year estimates for 2017. The total percentage of poor white residents versus poor black residents living in neighborhoods with 30 percent poverty or more was calculated. ACS estimates have sizeable margin of error and this may impact results. “Poor” defined as individuals living below 100% of the federal poverty line. Census tracts with heavy student populations or those that include a college or university had their poverty rates adjusted by using rates for residents 25 and older.

2. Population data and data for percent of individuals living below the federal poverty were pulled from 2017 ACS 5-year estimates. Neighborhoods were categorized as majority black or white if at least 51% of their population was a given race. Otherwise, they were categorized as racially mixed. ACS estimates have sizeable margin of error and this may impact results. However, most neighborhoods were far above the measured threshold regarding racial composition. Census tracts with heavy student populations or those that include a college or university had their poverty rates adjusted by using rates for residents 25 and older.

3. Map created using ArcGIS Pro. Benchmarks for poverty intervals are based on standards used by urban and poverty researchers (see Wilson, Sampson and Sharkey). Census tracts with heavy student populations or those with a college or university had their poverty rates adjusted by using rates for residents 25 and older. Student-heavy centers include census tracts in the following neighborhoods: The Bluff, Central Oakland, Downtown, North Oakland, Shadyside, South Oakland, Southside Flats, Squirrel Hill North and South and the Terrace Village/West Oakland neighborhood area.

4. Census level poverty data was pulled from the National Historic Geographic Information Systems for 1990 and from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates for 2017. Neighborhoods with more than one census tract were constructed using a weighted average based on population proportions. Because several neighborhoods share a census tract as of the 2010 census and St. Clair Village, South Shore and Chateau have very low populations, 74 neighborhoods and neighborhood areas were used as the basis for the analysis and for all analyses presented in this article and those conducted by the Pittsburgh Neighborhood Project. Because student-heavy centers can distort the true poverty rate, known student-heavy centers and those neighborhoods that include a college or university had their poverty rates adjusted by using rates for residents 25 and older. The relationship between neighborhood poverty in 1990 and 2017 was 0.82 (p < .01). ACS estimates have sizeable margin of error and this may impact results (regarding 2017 estimates only).

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