America keeps choosing poverty — but it doesn’t have to
Welcome to the first issue of Within Our Means, a biweekly newsletter about ending poverty in America. If you’d like to receive it in your inbox, please sign up here:
I’ve always been interested in how race and class shape our society and my work often focuses on topics like criminal justice, housing, and the social safety net. But while I like to point out problems, I also think that’s only half of my job. The other half is to ask, “Now what?”
That’s what this newsletter will do. Some issues will dig into the specific ways that poverty punishes people across the country. Others will look at policies that either exacerbate or alleviate poverty. The overarching goal is to find tangible solutions to improve people’s lives. And so if you, like me, think that poverty is a problem that can be eradicated in the United States, then think of this newsletter as a way for us to envision what a realistic path toward that future could look like.
Why so many Americans are poor
America has gone through many ups and downs since the civil rights era, but one thing has remained remarkably constant: In 1970, 12.6 percent of Americans were considered poor; in 2023, that number was 11.1 percent — or 36.8 million people. “To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills,” the sociologist Matthew Desmond wrote last year.
It might seem as though the persistence of poverty in the United States says something about how intractable the problem is. This is, after all, the richest country in the world. If America can’t rid itself of poverty, then who can? But it’s not that America can’t do it; it’s that it chooses not to.
That said, there isn’t a single answer to why so many Americans continue to be stuck in poverty. It is true, for example, that the American welfare system is broken, consistently undermined, and, in some cases, set up to fail. Studies have shown that programs like work requirements don’t work, and states have been caught hoarding billions of dollars worth of welfare funds instead of distributing them among the people they’re intended for.
But it’s also true that an extraordinary amount of money and effort go into establishing and administering antipoverty programs, and many of them do succeed. Social Security, for example, keeps more than 20 million people above the poverty line.
In recent years, America showed just how much of a choice poverty is: The short-lived pandemic-era child tax credit expansion cut child poverty by more than a third. And the bolstered social safety net from Covid relief bills nearly halved child poverty in a single year — the sharpest drop on record. Once those programs expired, however, the child poverty rate bounced right back.
One reason poverty is so stubborn
Last year, many homeowners in Lexington, Massachusetts came out to oppose zoning changes that would allow for more housing to be built in the wealthy Boston suburb. The people who needed the new housing were, understandably, not impressed.
“How do you think it makes me feel when some people from a point of great privilege say that they don’t want the type of multifamily housing that I live in because it may look ugly or doesn’t fit the essence of this town?” one young resident, whose family relied on multifamily housing to be able to live in Lexington, told the town legislature. “Are we really setting the bar of entry to be a $1 million dollar house to join our community?”
This situation is one answer to the question of what makes the problem of poverty so complicated: competing interests. The reality is that too many people benefit from the existence of poverty. The economy already pits too many groups against each other, leaving many Americans afraid that they have too much to lose should we choose to build a more equitable society.
Homeowners are told that their homes are the key to building wealth, so they reasonably want their property values to keep rising. For renters, on the other hand, any increase in housing costs is a loss. So while renters might want lawmakers to make room for more housing, homeowners often resist any change that could make their home prices stagnate.
This is one theme we’ll be exploring in Within Our Means — who stands to benefit and who stands to lose from the policies our lawmakers choose to pursue. We’ll also be looking at questions about fairness, political viability, and why antipoverty programs ought to be viewed as investments rather than handouts. And though we’ll often look at economic arguments, we also won’t shy away from arriving at morally driven conclusions. Sometimes, a program that helps the most vulnerable people is still worth paying for even if it doesn’t necessarily help the economy grow.
It doesn’t have to be this way
Even when divergent interests exist — like those between renters and homeowners — change is possible: Lexington ended up approving the necessary zoning changes to build more housing, and neighboring towns followed its lead.
This was not, by any means, an inevitable or easy outcome. For many decades, Lexington and its neighbors had been symbols of liberal hypocrisy — the kinds of places where you might see “Black Lives Matter” and “refugees are welcome” signs, but vehement opposition to any new housing project that would help desegregate the region.
But one lesson out of Lexington is that sometimes people need a push. It wasn’t just that the town residents had a sudden change of heart — though some residents had clearly been troubled by their own history. The state had enacted a law requiring jurisdictions served by public transit to authorize building more multifamily housing if they wanted to receive certain state funding. Whether the town ends up building the housing units that would make the suburb more affordable depends on whether residents put their money where their mouth is. But at least now, the door has been opened.
Some of the changes needed to eradicate poverty are small, unsexy bureaucratic adjustments, like local zoning reforms in Lexington and elsewhere. Others require an ambitious rethinking.
The project of ending poverty will be costly, but it’s long been clear that America can afford it. If more than two-thirds of household wealth is concentrated among the top 10 percent while the bottom half of households own a mere 2.5 percent, then nobody should be living in squalor.
“Now there is nothing new about poverty,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said nearly 60 years ago. “What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will.”
Share your thoughts
If you have any ideas, thoughts, or a personal experience with antipoverty programs that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at abdallah.fayyad@vox.com.
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