The Cost of Being Gay and Married

| Posted: March 26th, 2013

Photo by Simona Combi, Urban Institute

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in two landmark gay rights cases. At issue in Hollingsworth v. Perry is the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 banning same-gender marriage, while in United States v. Windsor, at issue is whether Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law for all citizens.

DOMA’s Section 3 limits marriages to those between a woman and a man. This means that lesbians and gays legally married in states that allow same-sex marriage are denied the 1,138 federal benefits, rights, and privileges enjoyed by couples whose marriages are recognized by the federal government. To date, gay marriage has been recognized in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, Washington, the Coquille Tribe (Oregon), the Suquamish Tribe (Washington), and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians (Michigan), but lesbian and gay couples legally married in these states and jurisdictions are not treated equally under federal law.

In 2009, the Tax Policy Center and the Williams Institute held a panel discussion called “The Higher Cost of Being Gay: Life, Death, and Taxes.” As Howard Gleckman wrote,

when it comes to federal taxes the question is not whether you are gay or straight, but whether or not you are married. Depending on the relative income of each spouse, married couples either enjoy a marriage bonus or suffer a marriage penalty. Of course, heterosexuals can choose to marry or not and live with the tax consequences. Gays and lesbians have no such option. Even though a handful of states now recognize gay marriage, for federal tax purposes their marital status is irrelevant.

In short, it costs to be born and married gay. And it’s not just the tax code. Gay couples are denied Social Security, inheritance (i.e., estate tax and retirement savings), and health care benefits taken for granted by their straight counterparts. A few years back, the New York Times estimated the lifetime penalty for a gay couple. In the best case scenario, it would be about $30,000. In the worst case, it comes out to well over $200,000.

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Three important questions about family planning

| Posted: March 22nd, 2013

The election of Pope Francis as the Catholic Church’s 266th pontiff has prompted dialog among social policy researchers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. As Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the pope was well known for his service to the poor and underprivileged. Those of us who have seen public programs struggle with increased demand and reduced funding hope he will use his worldwide platform to affirm the importance of a strong social safety net. Yet those of us who study family planning programs must expect to be left out of the conversation.

Given how many people in the United States have relied on publicly funded family planning programs—more than 9 million women according to the Guttmacher Institute —we can count them among the most widely used services government provides. But the personal, private nature of these programs, and the opposition they engender can make research into their use and efficacy challenging. Though much valuable research on family planning programs has been conducted in recent years, gaps in the literature remain. My colleagues Embry Howell, Fiona Adams, Jennifer Rogers, and I have highlighted these in “Focus on the Future: Revisiting the Family Planning Research Agenda.”

 1. How can we better deliver family planning services ?

Demand for family planning services has increased under Title X, enacted in the 1970s to help low-income populations get access to information and contraception. While Title X has been successful, funding has not kept pace with growing demand. Researchers must continue to document both the demand and the barriers to access that vulnerable populations experience.

“Focus on the Future” also highlights new research on interventions that effectively decrease unwanted pregnancies. These interventions are vital, as knowledge about contraceptive use (particularly that of vulnerable populations) remains scarce, and evidence supporting best practices that improve the provision and use of contraception remains weak.

 2. How can we improve access to family planning services ?

The literature suggests that some populations have benefited from increased access to family planning services over time: minority and disadvantaged groups, adolescents and 20-somethings, men, those with physical or mental health risk factors, and those with HIV. But gaps in access still exist, particularly among isolated communities such as immigrant populations, incarcerated individuals, and rural women.

Significant research has been conducted on adolescents, particularly on confidentiality and parents’ involvement. However, conclusions on the effectiveness of confidential services remain unclear. And as a group, older adolescents (20-somethings) have not received nearly enough attention in the literature, though 64 percent of pregnancies among this group are unintended.

Similarly, we know little about which services tailored toward men would be most beneficial, or how family planning services designed for men interact with the provision of services to women. We also need to learn more about how family planning services intersect with risk factors such as depression, obesity, and hypertension. Research on these topics has tended to be broad in scope but lacking in depth.

 3. How can family planning clinics improve their organization and administration?

The effects of Medicaid expansion on family planning services warrant future in-depth research. The expansion efforts that 28 states began in 2012 with Medicaid family planning waivers have proven effective. Yet the full impact of new Obamacare expansions and their new reimbursement and funding models isn’t yet known.

Our findings demonstrate that significant research is still necessary to pin down best practices for delivering family planning services and reaching those with the greatest need. Filling in these gaps is essential if we are to gain a clear picture of the effectiveness of family planning service delivery programs.

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Cultural blind-spots make "pathway to citizenship" a steep climb

| Posted: March 20th, 2013

The “pathway to citizenship” is perhaps the most controversial issue in the immigration reform debate. Among other things, a bipartisan group of eight senators has proposed that undocumented immigrants, just to get in line for legal permanent residency, meet thresholds previously only required to naturalize: passing writing, reading, and oral English proficiency tests as well as a test on American civics.

At first glance, this seems fairly reasonable to most Americans. So how would most undocumented immigrants fare under this system? If studies of naturalization are any indication—not very well.

Studies have long found low naturalization rates among legal resident Mexicans, the group that also makes up the largest proportion of undocumented immigrants. Most recently, a report from the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that only 36 percent of eligible Mexicans become citizens, despite their overwhelming interest in naturalization.

The report offers several reasons most Mexicans don’t become citizens, including language, financial, and administrative barriers. And yet, many Americans see these as excuses. Immigrants from Indonesia and Russia learn English and take the tests—why can’t Mexicans?

Much of the explanation is hidden in plain sight. Our English and civics requirements assume a level of access to universal public education that many Mexicans (and other immigrants from poor countries) simply have not enjoyed.

In the United States, only 11 percent of natives have less education than a high school diploma. Among Mexicans, that rate is 60 percent; and the truth is that “less than high school” often means much less. Years ago, when I briefly taught ESL in Southern California, only two of my students had spent more than six years in a classroom and several had no formal education at all. And this theme repeats itself often when I talk with immigrants for my work as a researcher.

Immigrants with such limited education have huge barriers to overcome. They work in the lowest-paid jobs—often several to cobble together enough income to get by. They have limited opportunities to interact with English speakers and great difficulty learning, even when they somehow find the time and resources to enroll in ESL or citizenship classes. Many extraordinary people manage to overcome these barriers and become citizens anyway, but they are too often the exception.

Without a doubt, just allowing undocumented immigrants to come forward, pass a background check, and live and work without fear would make a huge difference in their lives. But let’s not call it a “pathway to citizenship” if it doesn’t include substantial investment in not only ESL and citizenship classes, but also in adult basic education and literacy. It somehow seems disingenuous.

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Persistent crime in low-income communities can have devastating effects on teens

| Posted: March 14th, 2013

Photo by Flickr user abjam77, used under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and in Newtown, Connecticut, have sparked a national debate over gun control and the long-term impacts of violence on children and communities. Within this national conversation, however, we should highlight the compounding impact that daily exposure to violence and concentrated poverty have on young people in our nation’s urban neighborhoods.

President Obama recently addressed this topic during his speech on gun violence at a South Side Chicago high school. Persistent crime in a neighborhood increases the likelihood that a resident will become a victim of a crime, participate in deviant behavior, and have mental health problems.

We talked to teenagers living in low-income communities in Chicago and in Washington, DC, and learned firsthand about the debilitating impacts of violence. Young people described their lives as “difficult” because of the constant fear of being shot, stabbed, or killed.

“Can't nobody really feel safe too many places because there's just so much going on,” Britney, a teenager living in Chicago’s South Side, told us. “People don't care who they killing nowadays.”

Many teenagers isolated themselves or engaged in delinquent behavior such as using drugs, fighting and joining or assisting local gangs to survive their neighborhood’s violence. Living in perpetual fear and isolation has had devastating consequences on these kids.

Grassroots programs such as Beautiful U, Yes U, and the Benning Terrace Soldiers in Washington, DC, have helped young people navigate their challenging environments. But these programs often lack the funding and staff capacity to meet their community’s overwhelming needs. This is not a coincidence. Due to the enduring impacts of poverty and racial segregation, low-income areas—where crime tends to be highest—often do not have the social services and supports available in more affluent communities.

Without social services and youth programs, teens often become bored. They may turn untapped potential into risky behavior, like selling drugs. One young man in Chicago described this phenomenon.

Youth: But [my neighborhood] just changed maybe like after the third year.... It just got even worser, you know, like no activities....I liked those activities, something to do for the kids….And I ended up started selling drugs at the age of 12 or 13 years old, so.

Interviewer: Why did you start?

Youth: Just in the environment I was in.…you know, just something to do.

To interrupt the cycle of crime in low-income communities and the generations of youth severely traumatized by their exposure to violence, we must do more than enact laws to deter crime. We also must intervene by funding programs and activities to help youth cope with the psychological effects of violence and to provide healthy, enriching alternatives to delinquent behavior.

To learn more about the impact of chronic violence on young people, visit the research page for our ten year follow up study of youth who moved from two high-crime Chicago public housing developments.

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25 Years of Working with Chicago Public Housing: A History of Reform

| Posted: March 13th, 2013

Note: This is the third in a series of blog posts from Sue Popkin on her long history working with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the results of a ten-year study  on the experiences of CHA families as they were relocated and their buildings were demolished and replaced with new, mixed-income housing.

Chicago Housing Authority's Old Ida B. Wells Homes and new Oakwood Shores Mixed Income Development. Photo by Flicker user Zo187 used under Creative Common license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

As noted in my previous posts, I first came to the Chicago Housing Authority in the mid-1980s as a graduate student working on my dissertation. I went in and out of CHA developments during that first spring, each time more convinced that these communities were so troubled that they were undermining the life chances of their residents.

Getting Away from the Shootings and Violence

When I finished my PhD, I had the opportunity to become the research director for several studies examining the Gautreaux housing desegregation program, which provided vouchers for current and former CHA residents to move to areas that were less than 30 percent African American. In practice, that meant most moved to the suburbs around Chicago, while a smaller number were allowed to use their vouchers in “revitalizing areas” of the city.

The study is famous for its findings that suburban movers ended up more likely to be employed and their children seemed to do better in school. But what struck me was the fact that the women we spoke to—some of whom had left CHA more than 10 years earlier—still talked about how glad they were to feel safe, to get away from the shootings and violence that had taken over CHA’s communities.

“The Sweeps”

In the late 1980s, the CHA began an intensive anti-crime effort. The most controversial component was what the agency called “the sweeps,” where CHA police and staff would literally shut down a building, go door to door checking for weapons, drugs, and illegal residents, install steel security doors and guard booths, and issue every resident an ID.

In 1992, I responded to a request from the CHA to evaluate their anti-drug initiative. That small project evolved into a seven-year study that tracked residents’ responses to the agency’s efforts to control crime and gang violence.

We watched as the CHA spent nearly $500 million on state-of-the art anti-crime initiatives that ultimately proved futile as the chaos and violence overwhelmed the combined efforts of police, security guards, and resident activists. By 1998, one of the most effective resident leaders we’d come to know told us that she was so distressed by the violence overtaking her development that she was chain smoking and had to take medication to “calm her nerves.”

Address Chronic Violence through Redevelopment

Toward the end of our research, the CHA began its first major demolition and revitalization efforts in the Henry Horner Homes—one of the three developments we’d been tracking. While residents were distressed about losing their community, for the first time, they saw real and sustained reductions in crime and disorder

We concluded that, sadly, the only way to address the chronic violence and chaos was to demolish the large developments and replace them with new housing. But we also wondered if the residents who had endured the worst days of CHA would really end up better off. It seemed unlikely they would meet the criteria for new, mixed-income housing, and there was a real possibility that this new effort would just be one more blow for these already-vulnerable families.

But the study we released this week shows that many of those fears were unfounded. Instead, residents are now far better off than they were.

Some of our findings:

• The majority of residents now live in decent housing in neighborhoods where they feel substantially safer.
• Those who live in the CHA’s remaining rehabilitated developments report better conditions than those who are renting private-market units with vouchers—a finding that speaks to the CHA’s investment and to the variability of its now very large (more than 36,000 unit) voucher program.
• Most exciting is that Demonstration participants’ mental and physical health has improved significantly and their employment gains have held.

But along with this good news are reasons for concern:

• Though their parents are doing better, children and youth continue to struggle.
• Voucher holders report trouble managing utility costs.

While residents’ new neighborhoods are better than the old CHA developments, most are still racially segregated and poor.

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International Women's Day: Flowers or Powers?

| Posted: March 12th, 2013

A women's caucus in Kosovo, organizing data and government action around women's needs and issues. Photo by Urban Institute staff.

Last week’s celebration of International Women’s Day produced the usual should-be-embarrassing photos of a Russian leader surrounded by uncomfortable looking women holding bundles of flowers. In the Washington Post’s coverage, it is hard to tell who looks more uncomfortable: Vladimir Putin or the textile workers arranged around him. The headline explains: “Russian women get flowers, not power.”

While it is easy to pick on Russia for the incongruity of such a celebration in the face of male dominance of government and business (there is apparently only one woman in a Cabinet position), the headline could be rewritten to name many other countries. The new country of Kosovo, where the Urban Institute is working with 25 local governments, comes to mind.

Supported by an array of bilateral and multilateral assistance since the end of the war in 1999, Kosovo has a full set of laws and policies to promote greater roles for women in society. A quota for female participation in national and local assemblies is set at 30 percent. Indeed in 2011 Kosovo elected a woman, Atifete Jahjaga, to be president. But for most women in Kosovo, reality lags far, far behind.

Unemployment for women is over 60 percent; labor force participation is a third that of men. Women own only 6.5 percent of businesses, and those businesses are half the size of businesses owned by their male counterparts. Illiteracy among women is three times higher than among men.

But in municipalities across Kosovo change is in the air. Women elected to municipal assemblies are organizing and asserting a greater role, altering the direction of local policy and services (see photo above).

Taking advantage of the 30 percent quota, which extends to local assemblies too, women have formed 15 caucuses—informal groups that cut across party lines—in both Serb- and Albanian-majority communities. A regional grouping has formed as well, combining women from both ethnic groups.  In several local assemblies, women hold more seats than the 30 percent quota; for example, women hold 45 percent of seats in the municipality of Ranilug.

Why is this important? The caucuses are pressing local governments to mainstream gender issues, not leaving them to be “celebrated” one day a year. This is done by separating data by gender, enabling local governments to track services important to women. For the first time, local policymakers are tuning in to the gender impact of arrangements related to education, health, domestic violence, property ownership, and employment. Even when these issues are not wholly within the span of local control, the existence of data is fueling more effective advocacy.

In some municipalities, the push has forced local assemblies to open up key committees on policy and budget to participation by women members.  As the regional caucuses extend their efforts, comparative data on the role of women in different municipalities will be readily available.

If, as some expect, new elections are called as early as September, women in Kosovo will be able to vote with specifics on the performance of their local officials in view. This political empowerment is an outcome of work by many, many women—and men—in Kosovo whose efforts can, if continued, assure that future International Women’s Day celebrations are more deserving of flowers.

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25 Years of Working with Chicago Public Housing: Personal Stories

| Posted: March 12th, 2013

Note: This is the second in a series of blog posts from Sue Popkin on her long history working with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the results of a ten-year study on the experiences of CHA families as they were relocated and their buildings were demolished and replaced with new, mixed-income housing.

Photo by Megan Gallagher, Urban Institute

As noted in my last post, I first came to the Chicago Housing Authority in the mid-1980s as a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I’ve been deeply involved in studying the CHA’s policies, and their effects on its residents, ever since. Most recently, my colleagues and I finished a ten-year study on the authority’s ambitious Plan for Transformation.

We found that while the redevelopment projects had mixed results for residents, behind the research were stories of gains and challenges.

Families Making Their Way

We’ve followed one mother and daughter from their days of misery in the Ida Wells Homes—where the mother complained about drug users being so thick in the hallways that she couldn’t get to her own door—to their new home in one of the mixed-income developments.

The mother has been working more or less steadily since the move; the daughter, now 20, has a baby of her own and is working and going to college. Their apartment is safe and clean, and there are no drug dealers in the halls—all of which mean better odds for the baby as she grows.

Another mother we spoke to over the years moved to the private market with her two sons. She told me that although she’d always worked, moving out with a voucher made her take real responsibility; she now had to pay her share of the rent reliably and couldn’t “take a break” when she felt like it.

She was proud that she was now paying more than $600 a month in rent, and both of her boys were attending private school. The last time we saw them, her older son had dropped out and was struggling, but her younger son seemed on track to finish high school and go on to college

Finally, we got to know a grandfather who was raising several of his grandchildren in Wells (his daughter was a drug addict who was unable to care for them). When I first met his granddaughter, she was 16 and involved in a gang, though still managing to do well in school.

The family first moved into mixed-income housing, but when the grandfather lost his job, they moved again to a rehabbed CHA development. In 2011, the granddaughter, now 20, had a child of her own, but was going to college and seemed to be doing well.

A need for Intensive Support

We also got to know families with challenges so severe that it seems like they will need intensive support indefinitely:

• an older father with an addiction problem raising an autistic son;
• a mother with a violent history and severe depression, raising a son who is becoming lost to the streets and a daughter facing sexual pressures and her own depression; and
• a single woman who has lost custody of her child because of her addiction and faces such severe health problems that she cannot hold even a part-time job.

These stories tell us that although life for CHA residents has improved tremendously since my first visit, the residents who endured the worst days still need our help to overcome the trauma and damage of living in chronic violence.

We need to ensure that they and their children have the opportunity to live in safe places that are safe, provide decent housing, and offer a better life chance. And we need to make sure that the significant investment the CHA—and the federal government—has made in helping that happen is sustained.

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25 Years of Working with Chicago Public Housing: A Decade after Chicago's Plan for Transformation

| Posted: March 11th, 2013

Note: This is the first in a series of blog posts from Susan Popkin on her long history working with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and the results of a ten-year study on the experiences of CHA families as they were relocated and their buildings were demolished and replaced with new, mixed-income housing.

Photo by Megan Gallagher, Urban Institute

The first time I visited a Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) development was in the mid-1980s, when I was a young graduate student interviewing welfare recipients for my dissertation. My friend—shorter and smaller than me, but along for the ride to “keep me safe”—and I pulled up to the Robert Taylor Homes on a windy spring evening.

There was no grass, so dirt was whirling around and making children’s eyes tear as they waited with us for the elevator—we didn’t yet know that it was better not to ride them.

When we got upstairs, the woman we were meeting asked us why on earth we’d come up—hadn’t we seen the police and the ambulance, the evidence of another shooting? We had to admit we were too naïve to know what they meant. She turned out to be a fascinating interview subject—one that sticks with me after more than 25 years. She was a community activist and a mentor of teen mothers.

While we talked, the wind kept blowing her door open; it felt like a metaphor for the way the chaos of Robert Taylor kept intruding into her clean and orderly home.

Since that time, I’ve enjoyed a long history of working with the CHA to understand the effects of housing policy on the city’s residents. I’ll detail that history in a future blog post, but today I want to focus on some of the findings we’re releasing today after more than 10 years of research.

A “Plan for Transformation”

In October, 1999, the CHA formally launched its Plan for Transformation, which called for demolishing the agency’s worst public housing properties and replacing them with mixed-income housing developments. The Plan also called for revitalizing thousands of units in senior buildings and less distressed developments.

In 2001, we began tracking 200 CHA families as part of the HOPE VI Panel Study.  Our first rounds of follow-up surveys in 2003 and 2005 showed real benefits for families who used vouchers to move to the private market and for the handful who moved to mixed-income housing. But these surveys raised real concerns about the substantial proportion of families stuck in the CHA’s remaining developments—places that were growing more dangerous as the Plan progressed and vacancies increased.

Because of these concerns, the CHA began collaborating with the Urban Institute in 2005 to develop a case management demonstration to address the needs of the most vulnerable families. After two years, the Demonstration showed positive results, with participants reporting higher rates of employment and better mental health—and faring better than those in the Panel Study, who did not receive intensive services.

Our Worst Fears, Unfounded

The study we’re releasing today reports on a 10-year follow up of the Panel Study families and a 4-year follow up of the Demonstration participants. Our results show that our worst fears – that that relocation would just be one more blow for residents who had endured the worst days of CHA– were unfounded. Instead, residents like the woman I interviewed in Robert Taylor nearly three decades ago are now far better off than they were.

Some of our findings:

• The majority of residents now live in decent housing in neighborhoods where they feel substantially safer.
• Those who live in the CHA’s remaining rehabilitated developments report better conditions than those who are renting private-market units with vouchers—a finding that speaks to the CHA’s investment and to the variability of its now very large (more than 36,000-unit) voucher program.
• Most exciting is that Demonstration participants’ mental and physical health has improved significantly and their employment gains have held.

But along with this good news is reason for concern:

• Though their parents are doing better, children and youth continue to struggle.
• Voucher holders report trouble managing utility costs.
• While the new communities are better than the old CHA developments, they’re still racially segregated and poor.

While these findings may seem abstract, behind each are the lives of people and stories of struggle and triumph. In my next post, I’ll share some of the stories that keep me doing this research.

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Sequestration's Toll on Immigrants and Our Shared Future

| Posted: March 7th, 2013

Two girls at the U.S.-Mexico Border crossing. Photo by Flickr user Bosquet, used under a Creative Commons License (cc-by-sa 2.0)

Here’s what the scaremongers think they know about sequestration and immigration: that hundreds of undocumented criminal aliens will be let loose and hundreds more will swarm through our unsecured borders, steal American jobs, and abuse our welfare system. Setting aside the facts that many being released from detention are guilty of only minor infractions, that net migration from Mexico is practically nonexistent, and that immigrants give more than they take, the vast majority of immigrants in the United States are legal permanent residents or naturalized citizens. These nearly 30 million people will certainly be set back by meat cleaver­–like sequestration cuts. And that should be of concern to all of us.

One federal program for which immigrants are eligible is Head Start, which offers competitive grants for comprehensive early childhood services for low-income children and families. Under sequestration, Head Start funds will be cut by as much as $622 million, which translates to over 96,000 fewer children served.

The automatic cuts to education, however, will have ripple effects throughout the economy. Children of immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population. According to an Urban Institute study, they account for nearly the entire growth in the country’s child population during the past two decades. As of 2010, one in four children in the United States lives in an immigrant family.

This considerable demographic shift will have major social, political, and economic implications for the country. In less than a decade, today’s immigrant children will make up a large proportion of new workers, taxpayers, and voters who will bear the responsibility of supporting aging baby boomers. It is crucial, then, to provide quality education for these children.

A functional and successful public education system can help secure economic and social parity for immigrant children and their families by giving students a solid foundation for higher education and subsequent gainful employment. This in turn can promote intergenerational mobility for immigrant groups. Ultimately, better mobility means a more productive economy and much-needed revenue for the government.

Poorly funded public schools can widen existing economic and social gaps between racial and ethnic groups and between haves and have-nots by denying disadvantaged students the educational foundation they need to progress. Educating immigrant children, however, is and will be daunting for public schools due to the schools’ diminished capacities and increased accountability burdens coupled with the linguistic and cultural challenges unique to immigrant students.

English proficiency is a significant barrier. Two in five immigrant children are English language learners, and three in four live in households where no one older than 13 speaks English proficiently. In addition, many immigrants have limited financial resources. Children in immigrant families make up close to a third of the nation’s poor children and a similar proportion of the nation’s low-income children. Five in ten immigrant children live in low-income families, compared with four in ten native-born children.

This tenuous situation will be exacerbated by cuts in discretionary spending for federal education programs. Title I grants to local education agencies—a cornerstone program designed to help all students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, meet high academic standards—are to be slashed by a whopping $1.1 billion. This will leave 1.8 million fewer students served, among whom are hundreds of thousands of immigrant children. English language acquisition state grants, which help English language learners and recent immigrant students learn English and become proficient in academic content standards, are to be cut by over $57 million, resulting in over 350,000 fewer immigrant students assisted.

Coupled with state budget shortfalls (which can only worsen when the federal cuts kick in), sequestration will set immigrant children and their families further back. If so much of our future workforce falls behind now, all of us will face the consequences in the not-too-distant future.

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Moynihan Revisited: Assessing Changes in African American Families over the Past Five Decades

| Posted: February 21st, 2013

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial report on the state of black families argued—for the first time—that progress against poverty required family stability. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” released by the U.S. Department of Labor, linked the relatively low levels of nuclear families in the black community to high levels of poverty and emphasized the economic and familial roles of black men.

How are black families faring now, almost five decades after the release of the Moynihan Report? An analysis of national data indicates that little progress has been made on the key issues Moynihan identified. Further, many of the issues he identified for black families are now prevalent among other families. For example:

• In 1960, about 1 in 5 black children were born to unwed mothers, compared with about 1 in 50 white children. By 2010, non-marital births skyrocketed so that almost three out every four black children and almost one out of every three white children are born outside of marriage.

• The share of children living in households without their biological fathers more than doubled for blacks, whites, and Hispanics between 1960 and 2010. But the gaps between groups remain large: 53 percent of black children, 31 percent of Hispanic children, and 20 percent of white children lived in mother-only families in 2010.

• Although child poverty rates have fallen since the 1960s, the rates are much higher for black and Hispanic children than for whites. Almost two out five black children and one out of three Hispanic children were poor in 2010, compared with about one in eight white children.

Since the Moynihan report was released, another major social trend has put further strains on black families—the mass incarceration of black men. By 2010, about one out of every six black men had spent some time in prison, compared with about 1 out of 33 white men.

The Urban Institute, in collaboration with Fathers Incorporated and sponsored by the Open Society Foundations’ Campaign for Black Male Achievement, is hosting a forum to revisit the issues raised in the Moynihan report. Scholars and policymakers will assess the current state of black families and how they compare with families of other race and ethnic groups. They will also discuss the role fathers can play in improving the circumstances of black children and the policy pathways that await national action.

To learn more about the Moynihan Report, the current state of black families, and prospects for the future, watch our webcast live at: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/urban-institute-events and visit our websites:  www.moynihanrevisitd.com, www.urban.org, and www.fathersincorporated.com.

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