The New York Times, Oct 1, 2018:Â Detailed new national maps show how neighborhoods shape children for life
Research has shown that where children live matters deeply in whether they prosper as adults. On Monday the Census Bureau, in collaboration with researchers at Harvard and Brown, published nationwide data that will make it possible to pinpoint — down to the census tract, a level relevant to individual families — where children of all backgrounds have the best shot at getting ahead.
This work, years in the making, seeks to bring the abstract promise of big data to the real lives of children. Across the country, city officials and philanthropists who have dreamed of such a map are planning how to use it. They’re hoping it can help crack open a problem, the persistence of neighborhood disadvantage, that has been resistant to government interventions and good intentions for years.
The local disparities are the most curious, and the most compelling to policymakers. The researchers believe much of this variation is driven by the neighborhoods themselves, not by differences in what brings people to live in them. The more years children spend in a good neighborhood, the greater the benefits they receive. And what matters, the researchers find, is a hyper-local setting: the environment within about half a mile of a child’s home.
For any government program or community grant that targets a specific place, this data proposes a better way to pick those places — one based not on neighborhood poverty levels, but on whether we expect children will escape poverty as adults. Researchers still don’t understand exactly what leads some neighborhoods to nurture children, although they point to characteristics like more employed adults and two-parent families that are common among such places. Other features like school boundary lines and poverty levels often cited as indicators of good neighborhoods explain only half of the variation here.
The answers shown here are based on the adult earnings of 20.5 million children, captured in anonymous, individual-level census and tax data that links each child with his or her parents. That data covers nearly all children in America born between 1978 and 1983, although the map here illustrates the subset of those children raised in poorer families. The research offers a time-lapse view of what happened to them: who became a teenage mother, who went to prison, who wound up in the middle class, and who remained trapped in poverty for another generation.
The patterns broadly hold true for children growing up today, the researchers believe, even though the data reflects the experience of people now in their 30s. In rapidly changing cities like Seattle, some neighborhoods will look quite different now. So in drawing their opportunity maps, the housing authorities here also considered indicators like poverty rates and test scores for poor students today.
The researchers argue, however, that this data that looks back over the last 30 years can reveal something about a place that’s not captured in snapshots of its conditions today.
In Seattle, that picture confirmed what housing officials feared — that their voucher holders had long been clustered in neighborhoods offering the least upward mobility.
