We are a wealthy state in a wealthy nation, and yet one out of every seven people in Massachusetts lives in poverty. And even that doesn’t tell the true story. The number is 29% among African Americans here; 40% among Latinos. Regionally, it’s 21% in New Bedford; in Springfield, it’s 28%; and in Holyoke, 41% of kids under 18 live in poverty.
There have been times in America when the public sentiment has been awoken to what it means to be poor, and when strong, progressive leaders rallied the political will to fight that enemy. Jacob Riis, an immigrant Dutchman, gave Americans a crystal clear window on sweathouses and abuses in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, leading to child labor and worker rights laws that we now take for granted. We shouldn’t. These were hard-fought battles, relying on leaders who cared.
We took big steps, too, in the wake of the Great Depression, which birthed Social Security, and in the contentious 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society created Medicare, Medicaid, and the War on Poverty.
And then… what? Somehow we lost the focus. Hunger, homelessness, and poverty, itself, left the front pages and abandoned the front seats in American discourse. They became chronic, more hidden, part of the background. Maybe even, sad to say, accepted.
And so, poverty worsened. Disparities soared. In 1976, the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned 19.9% of the nation’s wealth; in 2010 that had increased to 35.4%, Massachusetts was not spared. Boston continues to have the fourth-largest income inequality among major cities.
Beneath these numbing statistics lies real, vicious, human suffering. “Poverty” means not enough food, insecure housing, unaffordable medications, no day care, high levels of exposure to environmental toxins and violence. It means watching even the small luxuries of life and recreation through a TV screen, knowing you won’t have any of that. For many, it means gnawing despair and self-doubt. If it were I, I am sure it would mean seething resentment that I could not have my share of the American dream. And who knows where that resentment might lead me?
And I would hear the Tea Party pundits blame me – those who believe wealth is a sign of merit and poverty just the inevitable outcome of the social Darwinian struggle – survival of the fittest. “Are you poor? Too bad. Good luck.”
It is time to change all that, and it begins with deciding to do so. It is rededication time; time to put poverty on the docket, name it, and end it. In the nation as a whole, deadlocked in Washington and victim of irresponsible political theatrics, that is not likely now. But, in Massachusetts, it can be: we’re the first state to make health care a human right; the first state with marriage equality; the most ambitious state in the fight against global warming. Let’s now be the first state that decides that poverty among us is neither moral nor inevitable and that on our watch, poverty will lose.
Ending the vicious cycle of poverty is not only right and just, but it also makes economic sense. Poverty breeds hopelessness, and hopelessness drives addiction, homelessness, and crime. If fewer people were poor today, we’d all have safer communities tomorrow. In the long run, we would be spending fewer of our precious public resources on prisons and public assistance. And more people would have more disposable income to help stimulate our economy.
Let’s start with kids. I propose that Massachusetts end childhood poverty within the next ten years – by 2024.
It will take three assets, along with the strongest possible progressive leadership. First, we need will. We need to see the faces and hear the voices of those among us for whom the “Great Recession” wasn’t new at all – who have lived in it every year of their lives. We need to remind ourselves as a total community that the term “Commonwealth” is not an empty word; it’s a promise.
Second, we need ideas – from within the state and from others. New Zealand, for example, a country with just about the same population as Massachusetts, announced four years ago its plan to end poverty among children, and set out a framework for action for almost every agency in government and in full partnership with private sector stakeholders. We can begin with that plan as a draft, and then make it ours, adapting it to our local resources, history, and sensibilities.
Third, we need execution – the same day-to-day executive and managerial attention that marks every grand and successful organization effort. As Governor, I will place the end of childhood poverty on my personal agenda every single day, insisting on the highest levels of engagement of the entire state government, full cooperation with every willing town and city, and participation of the private sector, with its resources, ingenuity, and, quite frankly, self-interest in a Commonwealth that works for everybody. We will have a public dashboard, read it constantly, and watch the metrics head where they belong: to zero.
Sound ambitious? You bet! But I am certain, based on 30 years of work to achieve previously unimagined breakthroughs in safety, reliability, and quality in health care, the end of childhood poverty can be within our reach. So now, let’s reach.
Thanks for putting this ambitious goal forward. The only way to make progress is to try.
Ignoring these things didn’t just happen because other things took our attention. There was a concerted ideological effort to NOT address them the way they should have been.
I realize that such a push would be suicide for a gubernatorial candidate, but if you want people to care about poverty in this state they have to actually see it around them.
Since Proposition 2.5, we have been “sorting” ourselves into enclaves that exclude others. A consequence of this is that poverty has become more concentrated, and thus harder to work with. A school can handle 2 or 3 ill-prepared poor kids in a classroom of 20. It just can’t handle 17 or 18 of them.
But there is no stomach to do this. Try proposing an affordable housing development in the most progressive community and people will rise up against it. Our state’s policies are centered on pushing the poor out of sight, out of mind. Once you don’t see them, don’t experience the impact of them, it becomes very easy to get really worked up about why your tax rate is 5.2% versus 5.0%.
Cambridge is a good example of this phenomenon. My sister ended up leaving the Jackson Circle housing projects in Cambridge to Section 8 in Chelsea, followed by Marlboro. She had to move all the way out there to find work, Section 8 housing, and a decent high school for my niece. We have heard stories of the homeless getting bussed out to Western MA. This will take a concerted effort to turn our entire commonwealth into a true community-one where we take care of each other regardless of what zip code we are from or live in. That effort starts with children, if we can eliminate childhood poverty and break the cycle than we can eliminate income inequality in a generation.
We are seeing a sea change of leadership in this country. The people are demanding liberal action once again. We need more De Blasio’s and Walsh’s in city halls, we need more Sanders, Baldwins, and Warren’s in the Senate (donate to Shenna Bellows taking on corporate Republican Collins up in Maine) and we need more Shumlin’s and Malloy’s in statehouses. Berwick is the right candidate at the right time. Glad to see him propose bold policies.
…or go to a statewide system, or fund our municipal services from something other than property taxes. Maybe you can talk me down, but whenever you talk about ending economic segregation what I hear is practically telling towns they ALL have areas of urban-style concentration. Some towns like their rural or even suburban character thank you very much and I don’t think that wanting to live in such a setting makes one a bad person. Unless you want to direct from the top where people should live in a way that would be intolerable in a free society, you are going to end up with uneven distributions of wealth. I prefer to focus on making sure anti-poverty programs are well-funded and initiatives are in place to end poverty (since really, there’s no excuse for poverty in the richest nation on earth, especially one of the richest states in said nation), rather than worry so much about the geography.
Gutting 2-1/2 means municipal apartheid, where each town gets the level of services it “wants” (read: “can afford”), and where, increasingly, poor people live in poor towns and rich people in rich ones. Like today, but more so.
Funding local services from “something other than the property tax” (to use your euphemism) is how we actually manged things prior to the Weld administration. It’s fairer and leads to more equal outcomes and is something that people actually voted for.
Just didn’t want to tie myself to a different proposal or know for sure what would work. I don’t have any problem with wealthier communities paying for and getting more as long as there is a floor below which no community is allowed to fall. Prop 2.5 predates the Weld administration and growing up before that we had to face its restrictions too.
I am viscerally opposed to prop 2.5 and would be hard pressed to come up with a worse law this state has enacted. The town in which I grew up and now substitute teach has been shackled by it and voters have been reluctant to override it. Prop 2.5 can be blamed for closing schools and fire stations in town, as well as the public library for six months in the early 1990s. It is the reason I did not have certain classes in junior high that most students that age should reasonably expect to have and the classes that remained were larger than they should have been due to inadequate staffing. More recently, the town has been willing to use debt exclusions thankfully for specific capital projects. I count among my political triumphs chairing a campaign in 2002 to approve debt exclusions for a new library and police station, winning both questions with 55% of the vote.
We did face them, in a balanced way. Local governments made painful cuts, but the Commonwealth also stepped in with significant direct aid to cities and towns.
That changed in 1990, and many cities and town have never recovered.
Rather than gut 2-1/2, which would complete the destructive buck passing begun in 1990, I would return to the more progressive solution of the Dukakis administration.
As Patrick once said eight years ago, the tax to cut is the property tax. Repeal 2-1/2 and property taxes go through the roof.
Until then I stand by what I said. Prop 2.5 shakles towns from reaching their potential. I know the first override attempt in my town which resulted in cuts not alleviated by the state were prior to Weld.
I think the municipal apartheid was created by Proposition 2.5, not vice versa. In fact, I read a paper by Grover Nordquist that explicitly stated that the effect of the law would allow people to “sort themselves” into various communities. The law was always about segregation.
When the law kicked in, Springfield was over the $25 ceiling. It had to cut services, services which it had chosen via local government. As problems arose in the city, they could not be addressed because the city had a fixed income. This drove out the people who could afford to leave, and this kicked off the downward spiral. I wonder how many people voted for the law, and then subsequently moved to a community with higher property taxes? I bet a lot.
Is there any sane reason that Springfield should be cutting its budget right now, lowering people’s property taxes? No is noticing the extra $100 off their bill, but I can tell you that I notice when the roads aren’t plowed, or when I have to zig-zag to get around hundreds of potholes each day. But the Proposition 2.5 ceiling has been in effect for the past 3 years here, simply because of the real estate crash.
Yes, the state should kick in a lot more local aid than it does, but you’re dreaming if you believe that will ever happen. As noted below, we live in a competitive environment, not a community, and we treat poor cities the way we treat poor residents, as if the problems are of character, not circumstance.
That’s a reference to a brutal regime of enforced racial segregation and two-tiered legal system that makes Jim Crow look lame. Prop 2.5 was part of the tax revolt era and I think most people like always just wanted to pay less. It sounds like from what you write that Springfield has also suffered and would benefit by not being subject to its limits.
I was quoting the above article. I tend to use the word “sorting”.
I admit I am not familiar with any studies of the welfare-economics effects of Prop 2-1/2 or the effects over time on where people choose to live.
My own assertion on that score is based on (1) the regressive nature of the property tax and (2) life in New Hampshire, where I once lived. NH relies almost exclusively on the property tax to fund most services and property taxes are high.
Income stratification by municipality became so severe there that disparities in education spending violated the state’s constitution.
If you hate 2-1/2 and want to return to the New Hampshire-fication of Massachusetts, the way to go is to cut state aid to cities and town further. This will create tremendous pressures to either raise taxes via override vote or cut services. the rich communities will chose the former and the poor ones the latter.
Ask the Gube candidates where they stand on that, btw. It was a killer issue for Patrick-Murray.
I suggest we should base what we think is right on reality and not what fairy stories Grover Norquist et al. tell themselves. Those people are not as nearly as smart as they think they are.
The term municipal apartheid was mine; “sorting” doesn’t do it for me.
It’s good that you pointed out the New Hampshire example. It’s definitely a valid outcome if we were to eliminate Propsition 2.5.
However, at least in my opinion, communities have changed quite a bit since 1982, by focusing the types of housing built in their communities. In my area, I do see denser housing built in the 60’s and 70’s – apartment buildings and such. I haven’t seen many if any built in the past 30 years though. I have seen plenty of $500k houses go up in those communities. I think Proposition 2.5 has trained local officials to discourage denser housing.
I think that the state needs to allow local communities other ways to raise revenue. A local sales tax – statewide, so as to not allow cities and towns to argue over it – could help matters. That would help denser urban areas, which tend to have a lot of retail in their borders.
I don’t have the exact answers, but it should be obvious to anyone looking at our state that we have a problem. There just shouldn’t be such disparities in housing, in schools, in quality of life. When the zip-code premium breaks the $100k range (i.e. the same house in one community is $100k higher than another community), that should make bells go off.
…but as you allude to the former system violated its constitution so the courts forced the adoption of a statewide system. This made the wealthier “donor towns” howl, but that’s tough luck as far as I’m concerned. In fact I think NH’s system strikes about the right balance of allowing densities to vary while making sure that providing services such as education is everyone’s responsibility.
I fear you have the cart driving the horse. I don’t hear anyone proposing the kind of “direct from the top” authoritarianism that you fear.
Many of us, instead, observe that rising levels of income inequality drive rising levels of economic segregation. People with wealth choose enclaves where they can find the things they want and can afford. That tends to drive up the cost of entry into those enclaves, making it even harder for anyone else to enter. Meanwhile, the less wealthy buy where they can afford.
The unfortunate reality is that people’s values and priorities are often shaped by their access to wealth (and vice-versa). So people who value open space, planned development, and excellent schools tend to buy into towns that offer those things. As that happens, the less wealthy communities find it harder and harder to accomplish those same things — there is an ever-decreasing demand from their local voters.
So it turns into a self-perpetuating spiral — the wealthy towns get wealthier and “nicer”, the poor towns get more poor and decline. When an upwardly mobile family in a poor town can afford it, they tend to buy into a wealthier town rather than work to improve the town they’re in.
The best way to interrupt and then reverse that cycle is to actively work to reverse the wealth imbalance. Use explicit tax policy to tax the wealthy, and put the resulting revenue to work for the less wealthy. The latter can be done directly, through transfer payments (like the Earned Income Tax Credit) or through increased funding of government services that benefit the poor. A good example of the latter is increased unemployment compensation.
The reason why Mr. DeLeo’s proposed linkage of UI “reform” to an increase in minimum wage is that it stands that formula on its ear. UI benefits should be significantly larger, and those benefits should be funded by significantly higher taxes on the very wealthy — NOT small businesses and NOT minimum wage workers.
In short, as we address wealth inequality, economic segregation will (over the course of generations!) solve itself. We should not forget that Roxbury was at one time a wealthy enclave of Boston.
I honestly think one of the downsides to free market capitalism is that competition creates winners and losers, and disincentivizes cooperative solutions to pressing social problems. It’s why curbing climate change is difficult since nobody wants to unilaterally ‘disarm’ by regulating themselves when others do not.
On the local level it means gentrification has been the only urban policy available to depressed areas since the Great Society ended. It has the tendency to do,as former Mayor Daley so artfully put it answering a question I asked him “push da poor to somewhere else. Chicago don’t want more poor we want middle class”. And of course he does since it stabilizes the downtown and public schools and avoids the hallowing out that we see in Detroit and to a lesser extent in Milwaukee and Cleveland. I don’t even blame him since the feds abandoned urban policy decades ago.
But we have to reverse it, and that means taking concrete steps to revitalize ailing communities and steering revenue from rich enclaves to the areas that need it. Tackling the revenue problem is the key to all the other ones (transit, education, healthcare, job creation). We really are living a tale of two states, and the way to beat Baker is to mobilize the other half of MA in an off year election. The Marty Walsh coalition of downscale whites, youth, and minorities is the winning ticket. Berwick is the only candidate that gets that-all the others are focused on the Middlesex County burbs exclusively and running on social liberalism. It’s not the way to win nor will it be the way to govern.
We need a graduated income tax in this state that is designed to generate substantially more revenue from the wealthy. At the end of the Bush presidency the tax burden on the wealthiest Americans was as low as its been in many decades (maybe 50 years). It’s no wonder that we are running up massive debts. I would like to see a major push in Mass. for a graduated income tax and i understand that might require a constiutional amendment. I know nothing will happen in WDC about any of this. We need more revenue in Mass. at the state, and local level.
I agree that a graduated income tax would be great. The best way to accomplish that, in my opinion, is to follow the lead of some other states (like MD) and add a surtax on the federal income tax. This could either replace or supplement the existing state income tax.
Sadly, this marvelous idea has been promoted for pretty much the entire forty years that I’ve lived in Massachusetts, and I see zero progress towards making it happen and about the same support for it from the public.
It isn’t going to happen in my lifetime.
There are two faster ways to significantly increase the taxes paid by the wealthy, each with a high threshold to ensure that they increase taxes only on the wealthy or very wealthy:
– Significantly increase the capital gains tax
– Significantly increase the gift/estate tax
Neither of these requires a constitutional amendment.
The problem with saying that towns should have significant control over their “character” is that they use this control to keep out poor people, and thus concentrate them elsewhere.
I can’t take a town seriously if they want to keep their “small town rural character”, but then pursue high-end housing development, and then they pursue high-end retail and/or office parks. That’s cherry-picking, plain and simple, and is how segregation happens. Small towns used to have a wide range of people in them – in fact, small rural towns used to be synonymous with poverty. Now many are synonymous with extreme wealth (see: Dover).
I was reading a study today which analyzed MSAs where the poor are segregated. Although Massachusetts didn’t make the top 10, with the exception of Cape Cod and the Berkshires, the rest of Massachusetts was in the highest category of economic segregation.
I really don’t think that people realize the extent of the poverty in places of this state. Using Don Berwick’s numbers, Holyoke has 41% of its children living in poverty. There are neighborhoods in Holyoke where that number approaches 100%. The Holyoke Public Schools are at 84.7% low-income. Springfield’s schools are 87.5% low-income. Now compare that to a suburb like Hampden/Wilbraham – they are 12.8% low-income. Weston is 4.6% – and they spend more per student than a district that is 87.5% low-income.
But I still want to reiterate my point, focusing on schools might feel good, but it is like spreading seeds on asphalt. Some may fall in a crack and grow, but most will not. We need to solve the underlying problems first, which is providing jobs for the families of these kids. That leads to a stable home environment, which leads to more chances of education making an impact.
…on the morality of choosing a town’s character. Maybe some towns really want to be rural. Dunstable and Carlisle come to mind. Maybe others do want high end housing and retail. Still others want to attract those that will be an urban workforce. People also have their individual preferences. On threads that touch on environmental impact we have people here who prefer city living. I think that there is enough variety of where people want to live and types of places for them to live that everybody should be able to find a suitable community. I do not think it is either necessary or proper to insist every community to have every type of zoning. The trick is to really help those communities with high concentrations of low income and the low income families themselves, not just try to spread them out in way that somehow statistically feels good, but ultimately doesn’t actually help much.
Why should some towns get to decide that certain types of people can’t live there via zoning? Why should this state reward the feedback loop that is caused by these actions, instead of trying to diffuse it?
Bottom line is that a town like Dover is very successful because it only allows the wealthiest people in. It can then afford to have private-quality schools, it can pick and choose only the best residents and businesses. It can import labor from poorer communities. There really isn’t much downside to being exclusionary.
I’m not convinced that figures into their thought process when all they really want is a bit of elbow room. It may have the effect of pricing out some people, but you seem to think that is the motive whereas I don’t. If you can make single-family homes on acre plots also affordable I suspect many would be fine with that.
What exactly is “elbow room”?
I can understand someone wanting to live on a 1-acre rural lot for “elbow room”. I can’t understand someone in that town wanting to block multi-family housing elsewhere in the town for “elbow room”. That is the kind of thing that causes segregation, and I strongly believe that the intent is to price people out. I think that desire is both to keep out poor people, and also due to Proposition 2.5, where every new development has a quick cost/benefit analysis done on it, and people figure that if it isn’t valued at $400,000 per unit, it is a “money loser” for the town and needs to be blocked.
Try watching the video from the people opposed to the casino in Foxborough. There’s a really telling section where the chair of their Board of Selectmen describes how if a casino is built, it will attract low-income workers who will want to live in the community, then they’ll need places to live, places to eat, there will be more duplexes with lower rent, that support people who have low wage jobs. This is at the 9:00 mark of the video titled “Preserving the Character of Foxboro”. He caps it by saying “it would change the character of the town”.
…can you?
Yes, I can fault a community for assessing a “value” on certain kinds of residents and then trying to prevent that kind of resident from living within its borders.
That would be like a business owner determining that women between the age of 25 and 35 are more likely to get pregnant than, say, men, and enacts corporate rules to discourage them from being hired. “But they’re just trying to not lose money!”. Same thing.
This sort of reasoning is why the concept of defacto discrimination is necessary. When defacto discrimination is ruled out, then virtually any rationale (“But surely the community shouldn’t lose money”) can be used to exclude whatever group is the chosen scapegoat.
You might be able to fault the methods for addressing the issue. I was just pointing out that it is human nature to not want to lose money, whether for yourself personally or for any institution for which you might be responsible, including a community.
I agree that it is human nature to not want to lose money. It is also human nature to be unconsciously and unintentionally more protective towards members of our own “tribe” (however we define that) than those perceived as “outsiders”.
As a result, the former all too often ends up being a superficially (and sometimes sincerely believed) rationale for the latter.
The concept of defacto descrimination provides the best way I know to discern when discrimination is occurring based on externally measurable criteria. A town that is ostensibly attempting to avoid losing money, and is in fact excluding certain demographic segments, is just as discriminatory as a town that explicitly targets the scapegoats for exclusion.
The effect on the victims of the discrimination is the same.
I lived in Dunstable from 1986 to 1997.
Yes, Dunstable really wants to be rural. I assure you, however, that Dunstable ALSO really wants to be, well, wealthy and white (more specifically, upper-income Republican). Dunstable, like many New England towns, has two populations — “townies”, from families who have been there for generations, and “newcomers” who choose to live there.
While I lived in Dunstable (it may be different now), the town maintained two acre zoning because “we want to be like Carlisle, not Billerica” (yes, town leaders explicitly told me that). Those two-acre lots were formed from farms owned by townies that were occasionally subdivided and sold off.
It is hard to imagine how Dunstable will ever approach “city living”. On the other hand, several things COULD change — and Dunstable would change with them:
– A significantly-increased capital gains tax and gift/estate tax would cause the wealthy property-owners of Dunstable to pay MUCH higher taxes to the state.
– A regional funding approach for education would significantly reduce the property tax burden of Dunstable. Dunstable already partners with Groton in public education, regional funding makes more sense than property taxes.
– Dunstable could greatly benefit from light-rail service to Boston, NH, Lowell, and even points west. Dunstable was, a century ago, served by several interurban routes.
– Dunstable would greatly benefit from a regional open-space initiative (again, funded by increased taxes on the wealthy), so that townies who inherit large farms (there are still a few) have an alternative to the slice-and-dice process that currently forces the town to build more and more McMansions.
Dunstable has learned, the hard way, that it will never be Carlisle. It takes more than two-acre zoning to be a Carlisle. Carlisle has geographic advantages. Carlisle made significant commitments to preserving open space and making that open space accessible to the entire region at the same time the two-acre zoning was put in place — Dunstable did nothing comparable. Carlisle is bordered by relatively affluent towns, in comparison to Dunstable, and so there was less “osmotic pressure” on Carlisle — the implicit economic discrimination did not have to be so intense in Carlisle. Significantly, Carlisle has been wealthy for a long time. Dunstable has not.
I suggest that rather than frame this as “free-market capitalism”, we remind ourselves that money is power in our society. When poor people have more money, they have more power.
When poor people have more power, it is correspondingly more difficult for their only slightly more affluent neighbors to exclude them. Chelmsford is, in fact, not that much more affluent than Billerica by objective measures — yet the two towns are worlds apart by cultural attitudes (which get reflected in, for example, the quality of their respective school systems).
I advocate change driven from the bottom up. In order to enable that change, I advocate explicitly transferring more wealth — and therefore power — from the top to the bottom.
And to go with this discussion, the governor just announced that funding for construction of $25 for state housing units. Where will these be built? Bedford, Boston [Bay Village], Worcester (15 single-room occupancy), and Springfield (16 1-bedroom units for people with substance abuse issues).
People will make the argument that these are the places where housing is needed, but that is a chicken-and-egg thing. People wind up in poorer communities when they are on the way down. There’s a good example on Masslive right now where a girl was arrested, described as a “city girl”. She is from the town of Wilbraham, the first 2 times she was arrested she was described as “Wilbraham resident”. Now she’s obviously struck herself out of that town and is now a Springfield person, maybe even living in a substance abuse facility.
Why not build such facilities in Wilbraham?
Since by concentrating poor and populations of color into small areas we dilute their political power and preserve the untenable status quo. That’s the main reason I am backing Berwick over Grossman even though I like them both. Berwick understands that this state is leaving far too many behind and is not doing the best job it can in lifting every MA resident out if poverty giving them a fighting chance. The rest if the candidates remind me of the NIMBY liberals I grew up with in Cambridge who pat themselves on the back every time a gay couple gets married but then sends their kid to private schools, votes against rent control, and watches the middle class bottom out and does nothing.
“we need ideas”
Oh.OK. Nevermind.
You make it sound like he had no ideas and was just blowing smoke. In fact, he was doing entirely the opposite: He followed that sentence by talking about New Zealand, which is implenting a program that we said we could do well to start with.
I’m particularly interested in this because in the discussion of universal single-payer health care, the right wing consistently denigrates and lies about the health care in just about every other developed country. What I like about Don’s piece here is his explicit willingness to reject these lies and this cynicism, and to say that we should be open to learning from the experience and the ideas of others, and to be explicit about what those ideas might be.
But no worries, he’s going to “put it on his agenda everyday”.
Your candidates has neither ideas nor any strategy to implement them.