A new national map confirms what many in Hartford have known for years — that a child’s chance of growing out of poverty is somehow linked to the neighborhood they live in.
This is easy to understand on a national scale, even regionally. In Connecticut, for example, children of all racial and economic backgrounds went on to make significantly more money as adults if they grew up in the suburbs of Fairfield, New Haven and Hartford counties.
They fared worse in the state’s urban centers and rural eastern and northwest Connecticut, according to the Opportunity Atlas, a new map developed by researchers at Harvard University and the U.S. Census, who studied the childhood environments of 20 million Americans in their 30s.
It’s that kind of disparity across municipal lines that prompted Hartford to start busing minority students to predominately white suburban schools in the mid-1960s. Open Choice is now a $35 million-per-year program, and one of the city’s main solutions to the 1996 Sheff v. O’Neill ruling that deemed the racial isolation of Hartford students unconstitutional.
Harder to understand are the environmental differences that just a few blocks can make in a child’s social mobility, now illustrated by Opportunity Insights, the new research and policy institute behind the national atlas.
For example, children who grew up in low-income homes in one section of Upper Albany — north of Albany Avenue and east of Woodland Street — went on to make an estimated $22,000 per year in household income. That’s $5,000 less than adults who grew up in similar households on the other side of Albany Avenue.
On average, children who grew up in similarly low-income families went on to make an estimated $32,000 as adults in Hartford, Windham and New London counties, $33,000 in New Haven County, $34,000 in Fairfield County, $36,000 in Litchfield and Middlesex counties and $37,000 in Tolland County.
The particularly poor outcomes in parts of Upper Albany don’t surprise Amber Elliott, a community organizer who works to improve conditions in one of the state’s poorest areas, North Hartford.
Across the city, some blocks have much more home ownership, or established neighborhood watch groups or diversity of businesses. In the case of the western section of Upper Albany, it’s also a bit closer to the University of Hartford, said Elliott.
“You’re more than likely surrounded by parents who are engaged, by college students who wander off and are part of the community,” she said. “It’s that visibility of opportunity, or access to opportunity, that will make you strive and change your whole trajectory and your whole flight path.”
Still, the map’s bleak illustration of inequality in Hartford was disappointing, said Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin.
“As Americans, we tell a story about our country as a place where anyone can find opportunity, no matter what zip code you’re born in, and this study shows how far we have to go to make that story true,” he said.
Low-income children from parts of Avon, Newtown, Stratford, Trumbull and West Hartford went on to report about $55,000 in household earnings. And in parts of Wilton, New Canaan, Fairfield and Greenwich, household earnings topped $66,000 for children who grew up low-income.
The mayor’s office said it will look at whether the atlas can help the city study its most challenged neighborhoods, and target the root causes of downward mobility.
Some of that work began in Hartford three years ago, when the federal government designated North Hartford a “Promise Zone,” a high-poverty community working to create new jobs, improve education and health and reduce violent crime.
Developers broke ground last month one of the biggest elements of the Promise Zone plan, revitalizing the long-vacant M. Swift & Sons factory to create an employment and training hub for residents of the 3-square-mile area, which encompasses the Clay Arsenal, Northeast and Upper Albany neighborhoods.
That project is led by Elliott, director of the North Hartford Partnership of New Haven-based Community Solutions. Now, she’s looking for her team’s next project in the neighborhood by tracking evictions and abandoned buildings, 911 calls and housing code violations.
She’s been regularly breaking down data from the census, city and courts to try to pinpoint ways Community Solutions can help. Elliott says the new Opportunity Atlas, which allows people to both download its data and upload their own, will make that job much easier.
“We are very excited for tools like this,” she said. “We like to have data like this inform our work and start helping us really map out and plan out interventions for the neighborhood.”
Bronin noted that the last few years have brought several other efforts to spread opportunity to disadvantaged corners of Hartford, like the redevelopment of the crumbling Bowles Park and Westbrook Village public housing projects, renovations to Weaver High School, the opening of the a re-entry welcome center for people leaving prison and the jobs coming to a planned hydroponic farming facility on Homestead Avenue.
Some of these improvements may already turn the tide for future generations in Hartford.
Going forward, the Opportunity Atlas may help the city identify other trouble spots.
For example, in the southern section of Behind the Rocks, children who grew up in low-income families went on to see an estimated $25,000 in household income — $7,000 less than their neighbors just over New Britain Avenue in Southwest Hartford.
And about $9,000 in household income separates those who grew up in low-income households in parts of Asylum Hill and those with similar backgrounds who lived just over Woodland Street in the West End.
The map also offers insights into incarceration rates of different census tracts by estimating how many people were jailed on the day of the last Census, April 1, 2010.
Of black men who grew up in low-income families in one part of Upper Albany — that same challenged section north of Albany Avenue between Woodland and Enfield streets — there was a 33 percent incarceration rate.
By comparison, only 11 percent were incarcerated from the population that grew up in the western section of the same neighborhood.
Incarceration rates were lower among Hispanic men, but still divided across different neighborhoods.
Eighteen percent of Hispanic men who grew up in low-income homes in the southeast corner of Hartford were incarcerated, compared to 4.3 percent of those who grew up in similar conditions in Sheldon Charter Oak, the study found.
And in Frog Hollow, 33 percent of all black males who grew up in the neighborhood were incarcerated on April 1, 2010, compared to 14 percent over Capital Avenue in Asylum Hill and 12 percent in nearby Barry Square.
But Mary Cockram, of Frog Hollow, says she was most struck by how many people who grew up in low-income homes in her neighborhood stayed in the city as adults — about 86 percent, compared to less than 60 percent in parts of more affluent Avon, Glastonbury, Simsbury and West Hartford.
“It was kind of depressing that (these) low-income people haven’t had the opportunity to go someplace else,” she said. “To me, it really felt like, ‘Wow, they’re stuck.’”
Cockram consults for Billings Forge Community Works, which began a culinary training program in the neighborhood 10 years ago after finding high rates of employment, and opportunity, in that field.
She’s hopeful that work is already contributing to better futures for the children growing up in Frog Hollow today, but says many area residents still struggle with food and housing insecurity.
“There are more vacant than home-owner occupied units, which is just a concentration of poverty that’s hard to overcome,” Cockram said.
“I really hope we’ve made a difference and I hope in another 10 years it’ll be more different,” she said. “But I think there’s a really long ways to go.”
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