Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Study points out Louisville's pockets of substantial poverty

Officials say city works for diversity

By Chris Poynter

cpoynter@courier-journal.com

The Courier-Journal

Thousands of Louisville's poor are living in 11 urban neighborhoods -- one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the United States, according to a study being released today.

The pockets of poverty lead to high crime, poor schools, depressed housing prices and few jobs, according to the report by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Twenty-two percent of Louisville's poor, more than 34,000 people, live in high-poverty neighborhoods such as Russell and California in western Louisville and Hazelwood in the South End. (Map, Page A6)

That ranks Louisville 14th among 50 U.S. cities for the percentage of poor living in areas where the poverty rate is at least 40 percent.

The numbers are much starker for Louisville's African Americans -- 40 percent of the city's poor black families live in high-poverty neighborhoods.

"This problem exists in almost every major American city," said Alan Berube, co-author of the Brookings Institution study "Alleviating Concentrated Urban Poverty: Katrina's Lessons Beyond New Orleans."

Fresno, Calif., had the highest concentrations of poverty in the nation, followed by New Orleans, where images of poor families trapped after the hurricane stunned the nation and ignited a debate about poverty and racism.

The former city of Louisville, before merger, would have ranked third.

Tami Emerson, who moved to Iroquois Homes five months ago from Frankfort, fears for the safety of her 13-month-old son, Taylor, she said.

"Bullets don't have eyes," Emerson said, standing on the sidewalk, her son in her arms.

Given the opportunity and the money, she would move "far out," perhaps to Okolona.

Emerson said if Louisville wants to help disperse poverty, it could start by razing all the major public housing projects, including Iroquois.

Metro Councilman David Tandy, who represents several neighborhoods with high poverty rates, said the city has worked to decentralize poverty. But he said the report is evidence that the city must do more.

Tandy is a lawyer who lives in Russell, one of the 11 impoverished neighborhoods identified in the study.

Local government already is helping to reduce the concentration of poverty, he said, citing the Park DuValle and Clarksdale reconstruction projects.

"We need mixed-income housing across the community," he said.

The city also needs to encourage businesses to reinvest in neighborhoods, bringing jobs and new housing, Tandy said.

"It won't be something that happens overnight," he said.

Berube and Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy program, said such impoverished neighborhoods do not appear by accident.

They emerge for several reasons:

The federal government concentrated poor people by building public housing only in inner-city neighborhoods.

Federal, state and local tax money and policies "favor high-income suburban development over investment in urban neighborhoods."

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit has reinforced poverty concentration because developers are only eligible for the credits if they build in low-income areas.

Growth in the suburbs between 1970 and 2000 sapped people from the central city.

"As people went, so did jobs," the report states.

Metro Mayor Jerry Abramson said Louisville is working to spread out poverty, in part by demolishing public-housing complexes and building mixed-income neighborhoods.

The Park DuValle project has been considered a national model -- and Abramson predicts the same for the former Clarksdale public housing site east of downtown.

Kim Brown, 26, who grew up in Iroquois Homes and now rents a home across the street, won't let her 4-year-old daughter, Pearl, play outside. The family "stays to ourselves," she said.

Brown said she might like to move to Park DuValle, once the home of Cotter and Lang public housing complexes that were razed in the 1990s and replaced with homes, apartments and condominiums.

"Park DuValle's got a better crowd," Brown said, sitting at a table in her front yard with her daughter, who drew with a purple marker. "It's real nice down there."

The hope is similar for Clarksdale, which is being razed to make room for Liberty Green, a new neighborhood being constructed with the aid of $40 million in federal funding through the HOPE VI program.

"We're on the right track," Abramson said.

HOPE VI, however, has been cut significantly by the Bush administration -- from $500 million in 2003 to $144 million this year. The Clarksdale project won't be affected, however, local officials say.

Abramson said the leaders of America's cities shouldn't be blamed for concentrated poverty. That largely has been the fault of decades of federal housing policy, he said.

But cities do deserve to share some of the blame, the Brookings report states.

City and housing leaders must be willing to build housing for poor families in all neighborhoods -- not just poor areas, Berube said.

"Politically this is not an easy thing to do," he said.

Last year, when the Louisville Metro Housing Authority announced plans to move some Clarksdale families into Crescent Hill apartments, some neighborhood leaders and residents objected, saying they feared an increase in crime and a decline in property values.

Cathy Hinko, executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, said that she was surprised that some people in Crescent Hill were so vocally opposed, considering that residents of the neighborhood tend to be well educated and fairly liberal. About 50 percent of people who live in Crescent Hill are college graduates, according to census data.

Hinko has lived in Louisville since 1983 and once directed the Jefferson County Housing Authority, before it merged with the city housing agency. She said that she has never seen a serious effort by city and political leaders to ensure that low-income families have the opportunity to live anywhere in Louisville. "We have not attacked this as a community," she said.

Hinko said she hopes Abramson's new housing policy, announced in August, will bring affordable housing to all parts of Louisville.

One of that policy's goals is to ensure that neighborhoods across the city offer housing affordable to low-, middle- and high-income families. The city will create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which will give low-interest loans or grants to developers who build housing that low- and moderate-income families can afford.

The city wants those affordable homes built in every neighborhood -- not just low-income areas.

Chuck Kavanaugh, executive vice president of the Homebuilders Association of Louisville, said that he also believes that the housing strategy will, over time, disperse poverty.

The nation, including Louisville, can use the lessons from New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina to reverse decades of concentrated poverty, the Brookings report states.

"It takes a long time to bring these neighborhoods back from the condition that took 40 to 50 years to evolve," Berube said.