Being poor makes it harder to move, live, and work

Back to Basics on poverty, public transportation, and affordable housing

Last month, the YouTube channel “The Financial Diet” (TFD) interviewed me about the intersections of poverty, transportation, and housing. TFD, a woman-owned and led company by Chelsea Fagan, features reported video essays, podcasts, live events, and best practices for modern personal finance. What does “modern” personal finance mean? Well, TFD goes back to basics with their analysis: they don't ignore the many political, cultural, and systemic reasons America's meritocratic, bootstraps narrative captures at best a limited set of reasons people continue to struggle to keep all the balls in the air.

It may seem “basic” or “rooted in fundamentals” to get down to the brass tacks: question the basic work ethic of poor residents and insist that they stop deputizing excuses like “my car broke down” when they’re late for work. But, let’s not confuse getting back to basics with being willfully ignorant. Poverty is connected to transportation opportunities, connected to affordable housing, good schools, and essential services like grocery stores – all of which are downstream of government planning and investment decisions that have sprawled those things out geographically with overt segregation motives. So, let’s get back to basics: let’s study the connections between these barriers to economic mobility, organize residents politically pushing for remedies, and show up in public processes where we can re-make and re-invest in safer, cleaner, healthier, more affordable options for housing, transportation, jobs, schools, worship, and more.

Please check out excerpts from my TFD appearance below the embed video. I added citations for your further reading/research.

Gordon Chaffin: Americans will use cars less when you give them cheaper, safer, and more feasible alternatives

15:00 min mark

Chelsea Fagan (CF): To talk a little bit more about the actual structure of physical poverty, we spoke to transit expert, urbanist, and friend of mine, Gordon Chaffin.

Gordon Chaffin (GC): American culture and history make it feel like poverty is a problem for the people in poverty to solve with hard work and pulling yourself up by their bootstraps. In practice, when people apply as much hard work as they can muster, they reach something called a “ladder to nowhere” [or “benefit cliffs”]. This is a term that's used with people who help the homeless as it regards housing vouchers, but it applies generally to lots of different services and necessities of life. People – let's say they get an education, they are able to get a better job with more demands — but then childcare becomes more expensive. That’s something that they need in order to be at their job! It’s politically difficult because it is something that requires empathy from people who feel struggle in their own lives. And it goes back to…it's always easier to say someone is lazy than there are a series of structural challenges that make it so that every new opportunity has trade-offs and you end up right back where it is “expensive to be poor.” 

35:20 mark

CF: When you’re in poverty, it is basically impossible to keep up with the times or demands of the job market. And transitioning out of low-wage jobs is a struggle because of factors like the stagnant federal minimum wage and corporate structure.

GC: Unfortunately, we haven't designed America so that jobs are always easy to get to, and school is connected to jobs, and your housing is connected to job locations. So, we end up with a situation where there's a geographical imbalance between good, well-paying jobs and a lot of the easier-to-afford places to live. And this is where transportation and mobility become a challenge. Even in urban places, there might be transit services, but it might be quite complicated to get the longer distance between an affordable place to live versus a good job. This is especially true when you look at housing for ownership rather than housing for rent. And so when you have a society, a country, that everyone has to “drive to qualify,” then you end up with people very far from their jobs, and you end up with job security being connected to mobility, and it’s dependability. That’s in the context of a country that has not invested in reliable transit service – automobile alternatives – you end up in a sticky situation where there are no easy choices.

39:45 mark

CF: …this [digital] divide increases and continues to perpetuate socioeconomic disparities for underserved populations. According to the ACT Center for Equity in Learning, about 17% of students are unable to complete their homework due to limited access to the internet. Additionally, 50% of low-income families and 42% of families of color don’t have the technology required for online education, according to The Education Trust.

GC: Another example I remember from COVID-19 is that with those emergency rental assistance applications, you had to upload a bunch of PDFs to prove that you were poor – prove that you had an emergency situation where your rent couldn't be paid. But, the PDF uploads were not working on the website where I live. So it's just all of these snafus that make it much more complicated, even if there's some level of an even playing field, and even if smartphones and mobile data can be cheap. Ultimately, the biggest cost is time. If you are poor, you have to take all this time to fill out all these applications. And whether technology helps or hurts kind of depends on the situation. And so it's kind of ironic that a poor person who has the least amount of free time in their lives will have the highest and most exhausting time burdens. Whereas if you're higher income, you might have more free time, and it might be easier to interact with all sorts of society.

44:30 mark

CF: …and when it comes to…really in some ways, turning poor neighborhoods into their own kind of prisons, urban areas have long been designed to keep the poorest residents from benefiting or accessing many of the luxuries that wealthier residents have, as well as keeping them separated from some of their most lucrative job opportunities.

GC: Cars as they were conceived – the first 50, 60, 70, years of their development in America – were promising freedom and mobility. It allowed for people to move into the suburbs, which was a creation of marketing, law, and tons of different government incentives and subsidies. And so the people, those who were financially able to, got their yards and their growing numbers of cars per household. Car-focused land-use planning did deliver that freedom, but it came at the cost of a dependency on those same transportation vehicles. So, whether you are applying for a, you know, working-class job in the center of Manhattan or you're in a rural town in Idaho, a lot of the connections between the job you need, the housing you can afford, the health care that you can afford and need, and the schooling that yourself or your kids need…they're not coordinated in a geographic way that enables easy travel using things other than cars. And, this is true even in urban centers. When you go past the five or 10 largest cities in America that have good, reliable transit, it's commonplace for people to need a car, and that's the result of a bunch of different, coordinated planning choices that will take decades to unlink and reorient toward empowerment at all levels of income.

57:45 mark

CF: Also, in addition to voting, you can donate and volunteer to organizations and individuals who are actually doing this work and helping these policies get enacted.

GC: My optimism comes from the fact that Americans are more than anything practical people. So, when you mobilize political people – which is just all Americans when they get mobilized to vote and participate in open public planning processes – you can create a group of people who say: “I want something different. I want choice. I want safety. I want a climate-friendly solution to getting around for things that I need. It is daunting to disconnect all of these interconnected, automobile-based, sprawl-creating policies. But, once you start changing the incentive structures a little bit – making it a financial benefit to change habits – I believe that Americans will start making those changes. It is not as idealistic as Jane Jacobs and the “eyes on the street.” Not, as much as much as I'd like to say in my more poetic moments. But Americans – when you give them cheaper choices, when you give them more choices, and when they're safer and feasible – they will make those different choices. My ultimate belief comes from more people participating in public policy, in politics. That's why I think in lots of medium-sized towns in America, there are lots of low-hanging fruit: e-bike rebates, bikeshare as a transit service, bike trails and protected bike lanes, and transit systems getting better after COVID – instead of a collective decision to let transit sort of continue dying.

DISCLAIMER: All opinions and analyses in this newsletter are those solely of Gordon Chaffin and do not represent his employer or community groups with which he’s affiliated.