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While poverty is a national issue that cuts across urban, suburban, and rural communities, it is disproportionately a problem that afflicts America's cities. In 1998, 18.5 percent of the country's city residents (nearly 15 million people) lived below the poverty level, compared to 14.4 percent in rural areas and 8.7 percent in suburbs. Although only 29.8 percent of the total U.S. population lives in cities, 43.3 percent of America's poor people are city residents. Cities have fared reasonably well in the economic recovery of the last few years. In 1995, the urban poverty rate was 20.6 percent, and since that time the decline in urban poverty has been faster than the decline in the overall poverty rate. In 1998, there were 8.3 percent fewer poor people in America's cities than in 1995. In the longer term, however, urban poverty has proven quite persistent; the urban poverty rate was the same in 1989 as in 1998.
Moreover, unlike rural and suburban poverty, poverty in cities tends to be concentrated. In 1990, nearly 8.5 million people lived in metropolitan-area neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more. Of these people, nearly half were African-American and a fourth were Latino. Overall, 17.2 percent of the nation's metropolitan-area poor people lived in such high-poverty areas, compared to 12.4 percent for the nation overall. For African-Americans, poverty was even more concentrated, with one-third of the black poor in metropolitan areas living in high-poverty neighborhoods. These neighborhoods tend to be saddled with myriad other social and economic problems: few and poor jobs; low-quality housing; bad schools; high rates of crime and incarceration; and large numbers of single-parent families.
Welfare policy and its ability to reduce poverty and provide economic opportunity are thus critical urban issues in this campaign. In particular, the challenge that American cities pose for welfare policy is to address overlapping problems of poverty, inequality and social dislocation.
Bill Bradley calls for greater effort on the part of government, as well as business, civic groups, and community organizations, to address poverty issues. He has proposed a $14 billion-a-year program to end child poverty, including raising the minimum wage to $6.15 an hour and indexing it to inflation, increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit, raising spending on Head Start to $8.7 billion a year, helping to pay off student loans for college graduates who agree to teach in low-income areas, increasing federal subsidies for day care, making the current child-care tax credit refundable, and creating community centers to provide after-school services and activities for children of working parents. These proposals represent significant attention to poverty issues that could have a significant impact on urban poverty. But these proposals affect mostly the working poor; they do less to address underlying problems of joblessness and economic dislocation that afflict many city neighborhoods.
Pat Buchanan has made few statements on poverty and welfare issues, noting only his approval for the devolution of welfare policy to the states in 1996.
George W. Bush has offered a proposal to support faith-based and community organizations in addressing poverty, including changing tax rules and funding new and existing programs across a variety of areas such as after-school programs, drug treatment, maternity programs, and pre-release programs for prisoners. Projected federal spending under the proposal is $8 billion. Bush offers a more concrete set of proposals than Bauer in support of faith-based organizations and seems to advocate more extensive government backing of such groups in addressing poverty. But while Bush's approach offers support for services and programs that can be tremendously useful in addressing many of the problems of urban poverty, it does not address many of the underlying structural economic conditions that contribute to the distinctive problems of urban poverty.
Al Gore also offers a set of proposals to support faith-based organizations in addressing poverty, proposing a New Partnership between government and such organizations. He points out that under the Charitable Choice provision of the welfare reform law of 1996, faith-based community organizations are allowed to receive government funds for services such as job training, counseling, food, and basic medical care. He proposes extending this provision to cover drug treatment, homelessness and youth violence prevention. Beyond this, he offers few details about how government would support faith-based groups. Like other candidates who support faith-based organizations as an antipoverty strategy, Gore proposes nothing to address the underlying causes and conditions of urban poverty.
Alan Keyes emphasizes the "breakdown of moral standards and self-discipline and the disintegration of the family" as the fundamental causes of "poverty, crime, violence, the decline in educational performance, and a host of other expensive social problems." He supports ending government welfare programs, which he characterizes as "family-destroying."
John McCain has made no statements on poverty and welfare issues.
The distinctive problems of urban poverty are far from view in the candidates' statements and proposals. Support for strengthening civil-society organizations predominates as an antipoverty strategy. Despite its potential merits on a small scale, such an approach does not provide the scale and scope required to address problems of urban poverty and its prospects for widespread success in attacking urban poverty are dubious at best. Only Bill Bradley goes beyond this approach to offer proposals for the expansion of direct government involvement in attacking poverty, emphasizing support for the working poor. No candidate has thus far offered statements or proposals dealing with the distinctive and overlapping problems of poverty in cities, particularly the need for education and jobs in America's cities on any significant scale.
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