Matt has a smart post about the geography of federal assistance:
One thing that I think is worth saying about this is that it may be a lot harder to help the people who currently live in economically depressed communities than it is to help the communities themselves. Oftentimes the best way for a person to improve his or her economic condition is to move someplace else -- to somewhere where his or her skill set can provide greater rewards. But in the United States, political representation is done by geographical area, so the tendency is for the residents of a given depressed area's representatives to be represented by legislators who want to bring help to the place rather than to the people as such.
This is basically Ed Glaeser's point: we should be encouraging people to move, not bring back Buffalo's glory days.
I'm basically in sympathy, but I think that this thought needs to be tempered with an appreciation of why people stay where they are. For people like me, and Matt, and Ed Glaeser, mobility is an underlying fact of our demographic; I could move to almost any city in America right now and find someone there that I know.
After talking to the economists at Mercatus who are working on their Katrina project, however, I'm a little less gung ho on the notion that the solution for New Orleans' problems is for everyone to move to more prosperous areas. The cultural clash between New Orleans people and residents of the cities they move to is apparently pretty strong, because of things like how loud and when music should be played--questions that have no "right" answer, but which everyone feels strongly about. Even in districts where they are of the same race and rough income level as the incumbent residents, New Orleans people apparently feel ostracized. That's pretty hard to take as a permanent condition.
More importantly, poor people in New Orleans had virtually no financial capital; instead, they had very rich social capital. Networks of friends, family, and neighbors substituted for things like credit and savings when they had personal or financial problems. In a strange city, with no network and no financial resources, they feel incredibly helpless and exposed--with good reason.
Those are the same reasons that many people in declining rural and industrial cities stay where they are. When I was doing an article on the economy of upstate New York, one of the most striking things I noticed was that people who talked about moving in search of better jobs almost all had at least one close relative who had already left. The people who were afraid to go were the ones who didn't know anyone outside of Buffalo, or Rochester, or Syracuse, or Wayne County. That's a problem it would be pretty hard for the government to fix.
Mandated pen-pals!
Could it be that the new neighbors are objecting to some of the dysfunctional behaviors that kept New Orleans and her residents so desperately poor?
For example, studies have revealed that poor children tend to live in loud chaotic homes, while more affluent kids come from quite orderly homes.
One would imagine it is hard to do well in school if you are kept awake late into the night by your neighbor's loud music.
The fact that we don't do this just shows we're not really serious about equality and fairness.
is today's theme: atomization ?
This reminds me of my days in grad school working as an intern in the City of Syracuse Government. Seeing that place fall apart slowly, with all the jobs leaving as company after company moved away from the arctic wasteland there, I always asked people the same question. "Why do you live here? Why do you still live here?" No one, even the professionals who worked in the city government, could really give me an answer. One guy did say "because you really experience all the seasons here, not like in Florida." I think that was sarcastic though, since the only two seasons are an inferno of heat in July and August and then snow, forever snow.
So how the hell do you know where to move? I feel like once you've heard where to go, that's probably not the place anymore.
When reading the post, I had the thought that quite a lot of younger people (myself included) have already had experience of moving to a strange place, with no social connections. I moved out of one of those Great Lakes-area cities, Erie PA, when I went to college.
It's certainly not the same thing as moving for a job. You still have the training wheels of parents and friends left behind, and a (mostly) friendly college administration to greet you when you arrive. But it really is the first step to mobility. Not just because it opens up new opportunities, but because it literally gives you practice at being mobile.
That really doesn't help the people left behind much. The city still has all of its infrastructure (and bureaucracy) to maintain, meaning higher taxes for those who stay. They pay more for less service. Because of higher taxes, it's less business-friendly. Less money is likely to pour in. You could do something drastic like Youngstown, and bulldoze all the old infrastructure. That's probably the best way out in some cases, but there aren't many cities willing to take such measures.
It's a mistake to think that poor people have lots of social capital. That may have been true for immigrant neighborhoods in the early 20th century, but it isn't true now. Life among the poor now is quite atomized. For instance, something like 94% of those in state prisons do not receive a single visit during their term. Or consider, people like McArdle or me would never become homeless, in the sense of sleeping on the street: we would always have a friend or relative who would take us in.
Of course, if you have no financial capital at all, I suppose that even the smallest amount of social capital is something.
The Federal Government could aid the Rust Belt quite quickly and easily.
1) Pass a national right-to-work act.
2) Forbid public employee unions from acting as collective bargaining agents.
With the private employee unions neutered by right-to-work, a major reason that (for example) new Japanese-owned auto plants get opened in the South instead of the Rust Belt goes away. And with the public employee unions neutered, the government cost structure that forces up taxes in the Rust Belt shifts to the one that prevails in states where public employee unions are prohibited from collective bargaining goes away.
Of course, any Rust Belt state could adopt those very same laws on their own. Which is simply to show that they have brought their competitiveness problems upon themselves. So let 'em eat solidarity.
Re: Or consider, people like McArdle or me would never become homeless, in the sense of sleeping on the street: we would always have a friend or relative who would take us in.
The reason we don't have a lot more homeless is because most people, even poor people, do have family or friends who will take them in in an emergency. The folks who end up sleeping under bridges are very unpleasant folks, often suffering mental illness or substance abuse, who have alienated even their closest family members so that no one will take them into their homes.
Re: With the private employee unions neutered by right-to-work...
You are WAY behind the times! Unions have already, and long since, been effectively neutered in most private businesses. This ain't the 60s, they're a long time gone. Of course maybe what you're really hankering for are the 1860s when some parts of the country really knew how to get work out of their peons, with a bullwhip if need be.
This whole thread misses an important point, namely that Americans do, in fact, relocate to regions with better economic opportunities far more than other developed nations. In Germany, for example, the idea of moving from the Ruhr Valley to Bavaria is almost unimaginable even though the distance is a fraction of that for those who move from the Rust Belt to Florida or Texas.
If you look at the unemployment rates for places like upstate New York, you will see that they are not out of line with the national average. Given that median home prices in these depressed areas are usually little more than $100K (or even less!), it is not irrational to stay in Syracuse and make less money than to move to New York City with a cost of living far in excess of what they are used to.
Uh, no, seriously guys... how do you know where to move to find good jobs? The question is far from academic for me.
JMO - exactly. New Orleans underclass culture was even more screwed up than U.S. underclass culture at large.
cf. Nicole Gelinas
http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_2_houston.html
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_new_orleans.html
If people in New Orleans had plenty of social capital, they wouldn't be so poor. Mom's on welfare, dad, whoever he might be, in jail, sister's pregnant and brother's in a gang is not "social capital"
Social connections are not social capital.
You hear from other people that the jobs are good. In our case, it's probably friends telling us that their companies (or those of *their* friends) are hiring; among working class people I met in Buffalo, it was the knowledge that friends and family members were making a lot of money somewhere, usually North Carolina or Florida. That's why you need someone else there to tell you all this.
The DC area is doing pretty well, by the way. :)
Freddie, here's a start:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2007/
There is an inherent assumption in Megan's argument that is false. Megan asserts that people in "Buffalo, or Rochester, or Syracuse, or Wayne County" didn't leave because they were afraid to, but that they should have left.
I think Megan is ignorant about the economics and demographics of many of these areas. For example, Wayne County was a fairly prosperous county, with the exception of the city of Detroit. While Detroit's population shrunk, that population of Metro Detroit and Wayne County grew. While manufacturing jobs in Detroit closed, jobs in Wayne County and Metro Detroit in fact grew. The problem with Buffalo New York or Detroit Michigan isn't that people didn't move to Miami or Phoenix. The problem is that people moved outside of the city. So now jobs and the tax base are no longer in the core city, and the core city is poor. So the solution then, is to move more people, thus impoverishing what few remain in what jobs are left? Megan, I'm trying reaaaally hard not to snark here.
I think Megan is ignorant about the economics and demographics of many of these areas. For example, Wayne County was a fairly prosperous county, with the exception of the city of Detroit.
Looked at in context ("Buffalo, or Rochester, or Syracuse ..."), Megan probably meant the Wayne County in upstate New York.
Wrong Wayne County: I'm talking about the one in New York State, which is rural. Though your interpretation is perfectly reasonable.
However, your diagnosis of the problem with Buffalo isn't. That's one of Buffalo's problems, but the MSA is also in pretty dismal shape, and would be much worse if a lot of people didn't move away, mitigating the effect of the massive job loss. Ditto Rochester and Syracuse. I can't speak to Michigan, but Western New York gets pretty large subsidies from the state; unfortunately these aren't enough to offset the economic decline.
New York cities also have some peculiar problems related to the state's regulatory regimes, which operate in many ways to prevent the cities from shedding any costs. This is not limited to the cities; the county governments in the region, and even a lot of suburban districts near NYC, have the same problems in miniature.
I'm not denying that "hollowing out" is a problem, but even if it hadn't happened, cities in Western New York would be in dreadful economic condition, because local incomes have been hit hard by the stagnation of the industrial base, but the wealthy downstate voters, who can afford fairly inefficient and costly governments, have made it impossible for them to cut their costs to match the decline. That's why so many governments in the region are at or near receivership.
Between sips of his mint julep on the veranda, jmo leads off the parade:
Gee, I dunno, could it also be that the new neighbors don't have particularly a lot of resources of their own and the addition of several thousand refugees to an already-poor community is inherently stressful? You know, competition for scarce resources, a concept with which you should be very familiar?
Awesome. "Loud chaotic homes" considered harmful; that was the slam on Italian immigrants back in the day...the WASP chauvinism (if not outright racism) is just breathtakingly blatant.
Oh, but of course one would, how gauche. And of course, this was never an issue before the Katrina refugees showed up, because one is surely aware that only poor New Orleanians listen to loud music late at night (if one can even consider it music). It so distresses one.
freddiemac - there is some truth you say about the emptying of rustbelt cities into their suburbs, but the fact is many rustbelt *metropolitan areas* are losing population as a whole:
http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/top-5-declining-us-markets-51299.aspx
So while it may be true you can find stable, if not growing, prosperous suburbs around Detroit (e.g., West Bloomfield), Buffalo (e.g., Amherst), Clevland (e.g., Solon), etc., even their entire MSAs are losing population.
I just don't get how you're supposed to have any concept of community in a society where every worker is an interchangeable part, expected to up sticks and move a thousand miles away every six months if that's where the jobs are.
"For example, studies have revealed that poor children tend to live in loud chaotic homes, while more affluent kids come from quite orderly homes."
If this was true, then all of us kids raised by immigrants from Asia and Africa (who tend to do better on average than the average American) should all be borderline retarded.
Whenever I hear how poor people should move, I think of that really old Dilbert strip about how life is easier for idiots because there seems to be an easy solution for every problem:
"If people are starving in Africa, they should move to France."
I'd have long since left Syracuse except for a good paying job, a nice house in a decent neighborhood which costs me about $1200 a month including taxes, and a ten minute commute to work for both my wife and myself. The winters are a little long, but the summers are quite nice.
A lot of people may be afraid to leave, but at least as many have it pretty good and see no reason to leave.