Neighborhoods matter: Exploring 'Opportunity Atlas' for places that might help poor kids get ahead

US Census and Opportunity Insights

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Across America, there are bright spots, neighborhoods where kids who grow up poor have a chance to climb the income ladder. But precious few of them seem to be in Greater Cleveland.

There are places here that offer a good chance for kids to do better than their parents. But here, as elsewhere, they tend to exclude poor and black families.

Because neighborhoods can powerfully influence the trajectories of children who grow up there, a group of economists has just released a free interactive mapping tool it calls "The Opportunity Atlas." 

It was created in collaboration with the U.S. Census Bureau and Opportunity Insights, a new research and policy institute formed by economists from Harvard and Brown University.

The atlas contains anonymized Census Bureau and federal tax return data on about 20 million people born from 1978 to 1983, starting with where they grew up and what their parents earned. It tracks their own income as adults, along with other factors like levels of incarceration, teen births or educational attainment.

The tool allows for comparisons of outcomes with family or neighborhood characteristics, across the country or just across the street, once those young people reached their 30s.

John Friedman, associate professor of economics at Brown University, said Opportunity Atlas can help paint a picture of what roles neighborhoods play, and will allow policy makers to spot, study and replicate conditions that create opportunity.

Friedman co-founded Opportunity Insights, along with Harvard University economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, to research the decline of upward mobility and look for ways to revive it. They collaborated with US Census Bureau researchers Maggie R. Jones and Sonya R. Porter to create the Opportunity Atlas.

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US Census and Opportunity Insights

Sharp divides

Like much of the what some call the Rust Belt, over the past few decades Cleveland generally has seen few gains from one generation to the next. Poor children here faced especially long odds against upward mobility.

The difference is starkest when looking at the outcomes for black men, especially those born and raised in poor neighborhoods.

That was true for black men across the country. Regardless of what their parents made, black men who were in their early to mid-30s in 2015 earned less than their white peers in 99 percent of the 70,000 Census tracts in the United States.

But the researchers found that race and starting income didn't tell the whole story. Where kids grew up also shaped their chances of climbing out of poverty.

There were few places in Cuyahoga County area where poor children were projected to have better outcomes. Most of them were in wealthier suburbs, like Beachwood and Shaker Heights.

But those were the exceptions, not the rule. “There’s not a whole lot of places that look very high opportunity,” Friedman said while reviewing Cleveland’s results with The Plain Dealer.

He noted the sharp divide in overall economic outcomes between the city and the suburbs.

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Figuring out the 'why'

Still, Friedman said, pockets exist everywhere that seem to offer poor children at least slightly better chances.

Identifying such places opens the door to more study on the ground to figure out  “why.”

In general, the research points a few things that seem to matter in neighborhoods that create opportunity.

  • Low racial bias
  • Stable incomes and affordable rents
  • The presence of fathers in the neighborhood.

One thing that didn’t matter as much as was a “booming economy” or the kind of job growth that attracts talent from the outside rather than creating jobs for those already living in a city.

Opportunity Insights researchers identified dozens of neighborhoods across the country as opportunity “bargains.” There, stable incomes and affordable rents -- $1,500 a month or less – promised better odds of success for low-income children who lived there.

The entire state of Ohio contained not a single such “bargain.”

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Tracing roots, exploring possibilities

The Plain Dealer got an early chance to use The Opportunity Atlas to explore outcomes for Cleveland-area children.

Here’s a few things we saw.

You can check it out here. 

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Cid Standifer

Racial gaps

Black men and women born in Greater Cleveland in the late 1970s and early 1980s made less on average than their national peers, regardless of what their parents earned.

Above use the slider in the tool above to see the racial disparity in predicted income for black and white kids by the time they reached their mid-30s.

Black men in that age group fared the worst, earning an average of $21,000 in 2015 -- $4,000 less than their peers nationally.

Black men from the poorest families made on average 77 percent of what black men from equally poor families made nationally. Their median income was about $10,000 a year. By comparison, white men born into extreme poverty averaged $23,000 a year.

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US Census and Opportunity Insights

Incarceration

One factor that appears to powerfully inhibit economic mobility for black men in that age group was incarceration.

Nationally, a one-day snapshot from 2010 showed that 21 percent of black men born to the lowest-income parents were incarcerated in a prison, jail or detention center.

On the same day, 6.4 percent of the lowest-income white men were incarcerated.

Overall in Cuyahoga County, 1.8 percent of the population was incarcerated. Among black men who grew up in the poorest households, that number was more than 12 times higher -- 24 percent.

In several Cleveland neighborhoods, the data showed incarceration rates for poor black men were as high as 30 percent to 50 percent.

Incarceration can reduce annual earnings for men by as much as 40 percent, Pew Charitable Trusts reported in 2010, depressing total earnings most significantly for black men.

It also impacts marriage rates and the level of engaged fathers in the community, which also factor into whether a more kids from a neighborhood are upwardly mobile.

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Black women making strides

The income gap for single black women in the study nationally was much smaller. In some cases, black women made as much or more than white women who were born in homes with similar income levels.

In the Greater Cleveland area, the earnings gap between white women and black women who had grown up in low-income households was less than $1,000. The gap was slightly larger for Cuyahoga County, at $2,000.

When looking at income for households, instead of individuals, those gaps widened.

In some places, the gaps between black women and black men of the same age, who grew up in the same places, was vast. Black women who grew up in a swath of the Mill Creek neighborhood, just north of Garfield Heights, made an average of $32,000 as adults.  Black men who grew up there made about $15,000.

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Lai Lai Bonner, Special to The Plain Dealer

Outpacing predictions

Jowan Smith, 39, above bested what economist predicted she'd make based on where she grew up in Hough. She now runs a program aimed at helping families get her children into college.

Read more about her journey. 

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Cid Standifer

Leaving Cleveland

Many children who grew up poor in Cleveland in the 1980s did better if they left the city. But it was often hard for them to do so, and most stayed.

Averaged across all races, people born here in the late 1970s and early 1980s who left Cleveland made on average $45,000, about $5,000 more than the people who stayed.

On the left side of the slider above see areas where more low income kids stayed in Cleveland. On the right see their predicted incomes.

Black men from the poorest families were an exception to this pattern. By the time they reached their mid-30s, they made about the same regardless of whether they stayed or left: $10,000 per household per year.

It would be important to know why people left, Friedman said. Did they have to leave to succeed? Or did they leave to attend college or for some other reason?

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US Census and Opportunity Insights

For example, kids who grew up poor in a set of blocks around East 79th and Chester in the Hough neighborhood tended to stay, 88 percent of them, in the Cleveland area.

As adults, in their mid-30s, they made about $19,000 a year.

Just four miles away, kids from low-income families east of Lee Road and south of Shaker Boulevard in Shaker Heights fared far better.

In their mid-30s, they averaged about $44,000 a year. Some 75 percent of them, though, were making that money somewhere else. They’d left Northeast Ohio.

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US Census and Opportunity Insights

Areas of opportunity?

Potential areas of opportunity for poor children seem to emerge at the edges of the Cleveland and in some of the eastern suburbs. One of the underpinnings of the Opportunity Insights research is that moving, sometimes even a few blocks from a "below-average" neighborhood  into an "above-average" neighborhood can make a significant difference in a child’s future. Doing so at birth could increase lifetime earnings by as much as $200,000.

For instance, low-income kids  who grew up in the 1980s in University Heights along a swath of Silsby Road east of Warrensville Center Road, made on average $45,000 in their mid-30s. Just a west of there, on the other side of Warrensville Center Road, kids who got the same start in life made on average about $26,000.

It will take more than looking at a map to understand what, aside from geography, might contribute to that big of a difference.

It’s worth doing, Friedman says.

“We can think about how we can help kids do better,” he said. That might not mean closing the huge gaps between rich and poor. “But if we can think about how we can close half the gap?”

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