Pockets of poverty
Published March 10, 2014
Editorial by Greensboro News-Record, March 4, 2014.
North Carolina’s metro mayors heard a sobering report when they met in Charlotte last week.
Poverty is a bigger problem for them than it is for the state’s economically distressed small towns and rural areas.
The question is how much help they’ll demand from the state.
William High of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies examined poverty rates, per-capita income and unemployment across the state and labeled 162 census tracts as “severely economically distressed.” Two-thirds of them are in urban areas. Ten of the 11 most severely distressed zones are in cities: the Leonard Avenue area in High Point, the Cumberland Street neighborhood in Greensboro, four tracts in Charlotte, three in Winston-Salem and even one in Raleigh.
Comparing urban to rural poverty finds surprising differences. People in distressed rural areas are more likely to own their homes and a car than those in distressed urban areas. They have higher incomes and lower unemployment. There is less of a racial gap: In rural distressed areas, 45 percent of residents are black, 37 percent are white and 7 percent are Latino. In urban distressed areas, 61 percent are black, 23 percent are white and 12 percent are Latino.
North Carolina’s larger cities generally are doing much better than small towns and rural areas, where declining population and a shrinking tax base add to troubles. But that’s part of what makes the problem of urban poverty more acute.
“Areas of concentrated poverty tend to have higher crime rates, lower housing quality and poor health outcomes,” High’s report says. “With high levels of unemployment, more than 50 percent of children living in poverty, and low levels of education, these tracts offer diminished social and economic opportunity, especially for their younger residents.”
The report also notes that the state has provided programs “aimed at correcting the economic disparity between rural and urban areas.” Efforts to help rural areas include greater funding for schools and public health, and economic development policies that offer greater incentives for businesses that locate or expand in distressed counties.
Yet, many urban areas are more economically distressed.
It’s encouraging that metro mayors have put this problem on their priority list. They should use their resources to bring jobs to distressed areas, reduce crime and attack other social ills.
They also should press their state representatives for help. Decisions to deny expanded Medicaid coverage, flatten school spending and trim unemployment benefits reach deeply into high-poverty communities. Cities can’t compensate for these losses, but they will pay a price for them.
“I wish the legislature would partner with us on some of these issues besides economic development,” Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan said Monday.
It should. The cities are North Carolina’s economic engines, but their future is threatened by these pockets of poverty. Cities, and the state, have a strong interest in spreading prosperity.
March 10, 2014 at 9:18 am
Norm Kelly says:
Greensboro News-Record. All the news that fit to ignore? Editorials that toe the lib line? Ideas to move anyone into the future? Or are the ideas presented in this publication designed to promote a specific agenda? Are the ideas new, innovative, promoting self-reliance, independence, families?
For years we've been told in NC that our rural areas were economically distressed. The idea presented (by libs) was that the state needed to spend more money in rural areas attempting to alleviate all social ills. Education funding must be disproportionately higher in rural areas to compensate for the higher tax base in the urban areas. Unemployment benefits, we were told, was the life-blood of rural areas. Paying farmers whether their crops prospered or not was critical. Various other social engineering projects were mandatory and only heartless conservative/Republican politicians would see it any other way.
Then we get to the meat of this editorial. 'They also should press their state representatives for help. Decisions to deny expanded Medicaid coverage, flatten school spending and trim unemployment benefits reach deeply into high-poverty communities'. The lib solution presents itself once again. Is there no alternative? Mayors of urbanville should beg the state for help. A state where money is tight and has been for years. A state where rural areas have sued for their 'fair share' of state funds. But now the urban areas should start lobbying the state for more assistance also. Where is THIS money supposed to come from? Who's back pocket is a bottomless pit of money for the state to steal. Don't forget, the Dems in Washington are doing their fair share of stealing money from our back pockets, so the state's ability to do the same is diminishing rapidly.
Second step: expand Medicaid coverage. Another call to rabidly support Obamacancer. Without expanded free stuff for people, they will die from some health related issue. (NOTE: everyone dies from some health related issue. for some it's old age. for others it ain't. but it happens to people who have doctors and insurance also.) Are Medicaid doctors just crawling out of the woodwork to take on more patients whose bills don't get paid? Nope. The opposite is happening. Doctors and hospitals are leaving the system, refusing to take certain government subsistence programs. So how does making the pool of people bigger make it easier to see fewer doctors? And, the unanswerable question again, for all you libs: who pays for the expanded Medicaid?
Flatten school spending. How does this happen? Some judge somewhere says that the state MUST pay more for schools in some district in order to make it 'more fair'. Then along come the urban areas demanding the state 'flatten' school spending. Does this mean that some money is taken away from the rural area and given back to the urban area so the per-pupil spending is identical? Will the judge go along with this plan? Will the affected citizens go along with this plan? Will it have any affect? Just another lib idea that has zero chance of success, but it makes people feel good. And for libs, feelings ARE everything.
Trim unemployment benefits. The NCGA asked permission of Washington central planners to fairly adjust unemployment 'benefits' in such a way that the state could afford the demands for spending from Washington. The central planners refused to let NC modify the payments so that the state could continue to afford to pay the benefits. The NCGA had virtually no choice but to do what they did. The state was already some $2BILLION in debt to the central planners for unemployment benefits. And the central planners were demanding that we continue to go further in debt to satisfy no one but the central planners. At some point even non-thinking lib supporters, including you media types, have got to ask lib politicians exactly where they expected this debt to be paid back from. What was the Demon plan to pay back the state when they borrowed the money? What is the continuing plan from the Demons on how to continue to pay extended unemployment benefits in the future? Did the Demons have a plan? NO! No plan for the debt already incurred and NO plan for future debts.
Also, please find some lib who can explain the math on this unemployment benefit thing. The total state budget is about $23BILLION. The loan, just this one line item, from the central planners to our state just to cover extended unemployment benefits, was about $2BILLION. To me this comes out to about 10% of the total budget for A SINGLE LINE ITEM. A single line item with no plan for payback. No plan on how to prevent the state from borrowing even more money from the central planners in the future. Only an idea, an unexpressed idea, that the cycle would simply continue until the debt to the central planners would exceed the original 10% figure. What would be sufficient for libs? They refuse to define. Would 20% of total budget spending be sufficient to satisfy the unemployment benefits scheme? When the debt to the central planners reached 30% of total budget spending, would that be enough to satisfy libs? Would that level of debt for a single line item allow libs to claim they had done everything in their power to insure unemployed people didn't starve? I don't want anyone to starve, but to force employed people into debt doesn't make sense either. Except that socialism has the result, every time, of making sure that everyone suffers at the same level. Socialism does NOT promote success, it promotes failure. Look it up.
