Do Nashville children born into poverty have the opportunity to make it out?

IT’S HARDER IN DAVIDSON COUNTY TO GET OUT OF GENERATIONAL POVERTY

BY HANNAH HERNER

A child born into poverty in Davidson County has one of the lowest likelihoods in the country to one day make a moderate or high income. In other words, they have a low chance of upward economic mobility.

Davidson County is in the lowest five percent for economic mobility among 2,700 counties in the U.S., according to data cited in the 2019 Community Needs Evaluation put together by Metro Social Services.

This number actually came from a national study done by economist Raj Chetty at Harvard University. Chetty thinks of this economic mobility data as a quantifiable way to look at the American Dream, asking the big question: Do children born into poverty have the opportunity to make it to the top?

Child development expert and equity and inclusion consultant Ingrid Cockhren says there can be a lot standing the way of that.

“It’s an interesting dynamic here in the United States because that’s kind of the motto, the American Dream is that you can become who you want to be,” she says. “But that’s not really true here. Because we have that ideology about the American Dream, then we as a society often ignore the barriers in place when it comes to what it really looks like to break the chains of poverty.”

A new direction for the evaluation

This is the first time the Community Needs Evaluation has dedicated a section to economic mobility.

Abdelghani Barre, director of strategic planning and research for Metro Social Services says that when they first started putting together this report 10 years ago, it was at the heels of the Great Recession, so the focus was on the effects of that. Affordable housing has consistently been a top concern covered in the assessment over the years. But for this report and moving forward, Metro Social Services looks to shift to looking beyond the typical statistics to look at economic well-being.

“In the past we’ve focused on poverty because it’s familiar,” says Barre. “Those numbers are out there, but I think when you analyze economic and social well-being, you can have this picture of — not all neighborhoods are experiencing things the same way, not all workers are experiencing things the same way.”

The impact of neighborhood

The needs report explains that the short answer for overcoming poverty is a quality education that leads to a job that pays a living wage. But access to these things isn’t equitable — and your chances of getting them are smaller if you’re black and live in a majority black neighborhood.

“When we look at what the Great Recession did to the economy, African Americans were the last group to come out of that,” Barre says. “There is still a hangover in terms of their ability to rebuild the wealth that they lost. And that pointed to one thing, which is the neighborhood that you live in.”

Both Barre and Cockhren brought up the example of the North Nashville area as one that has it particularly hard when it comes to breaking the cycle of poverty. Cockhren credits the high incarceration rate in the historically black neighborhood to over-policing and a racially biased legal system. It’s a racism issue, she says. Incarceration of a family member is traumatic for a child, and that trauma causes changes to the brain, making it harder to break out of poverty.

Schools in these neighborhoods are historically underfunded, too, Cockhren says. The education system can be racist and teacher bias plays a role in any school, she added.

“Even though I’m getting the same education as a white student in this school, doesn’t mean I’m going to have the same outcomes,” Cockhren says. “Because teacher expectations are huge. And teachers have just as much impact on children as parents after they get out of that early childhood stage. The achievement gap in Nashville is extreme. When we don’t put our efforts into those children who have lower academic performance, then we are continuing this intergenerational poverty cycle.”

It’s worse in the South

Economic mobility has steadily been declining across the country since the 1940s, but it’s especially bad in the South. Looking back, the South took longer than other parts of the country to develop industries other than agriculture, which further perpetrated slave labor. Redlining practices prevented African American families from being able to buy a home and build wealth. But even once the economy began to change and industries like car manufacturing plants started to bring jobs here, the South is a hostile environment for unions, so workers don’t get their living wage. Each of these things put the South down a peg when it comes to the chance for economic mobility, Barre says.

“A combination of historical segregation issues, but also a transforming economy that does not create jobs with a living wage has made the South so distinctive when it comes to not having economic mobility,” he says.

So, what would actually help a person be more successful than their parents? It’s either leaving the neighborhood to get more resources, or having more resources brought to the neighborhood, the report explains. Section 8 vouchers are an example of a ticket out of the neighborhood, but something is lost when that happens, Barre says.

“Even though these neighborhoods don’t have a lot of opportunity, some studies show that those who move out lose a lot of social capital.” Barre says. “Even though they were low-income, they have neighbors that they trusted to watch their children while they are going to work. That bond and social capital is something that many families would lose, even if they move to a better, middle class neighborhood.”

So the answer is to invest in these neighborhoods, and look at the systems — education, job market, criminal justice, housing and others — that stand in the way of success for the people who live in them, Cockhren says.

“Jobs and education can only do so much and the reason why is because those jobs and education are dependent on a good system,” she says “And a good system is not racist, or sexist, or ageist. A good system that’s giving you education for everyone that’s positive — that’s not what we have.”

She added: “You can only be a good decision maker if you have good options. We can invest in families with young children who are in poverty — they need a lot of support so they can break this chain. And that’s going to look like wrap-around services.”

The Family Center offers classes, family coaching and consulting aimed at breaking these cycles of poverty in a trauma-informed way. CEO Susan Galeas says the old “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” adage doesn’t apply anymore, if it ever did. Studies she’s familiar with are showing that trauma can actually embed itself in a person’s DNA to be passed down to future generations.

“When you look at family histories where there have been high levels of trauma over multiple generations, it is much harder for those children without significant support,” Galeas says. ”It is much harder for them to tap into their innate ability to be successful.”

When asked the big question of whether children born into poverty have the opportunity to make it to the top, she says, “I think that children innately have the opportunity. I think that our familial and environmental structures can hinder that innate ability.”

NASHVILLE SOCCER CLUB’S SENIOR DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT TALKS ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCE WITH ECONOMIC MOBILITY Q&A WITH BRANDON HILL

BY HANNAH HERNER

Brandon Hill grew up in James Cayce Homes, Nashville’s largest public housing complex. The average income for a household there is around $5,000 and the complex is made up of 90 percent black residents. He was able to experience upward economic mobility in his own life, while many of his peers weren’t.

Hill works doing community engagement for Nashville Soccer Club, and seeks to reach back out to those communities. We talked to Hill about what made the difference for him.

So tell me about what your childhood was like.

The neighborhood I grew up in was very segregated, a very under-resourced community. I went to a lot of the public schools in the area and of course my family got a lot of the services and public assistance that was available. Typical of what you see in concentrated poverty in inner cities, there’s drugs, there’s crime. And those types of things just become par for the course.

My family eventually moved their way out of the inner city, and further and further out into the suburbs. I ended up in Antioch during my high school years.

What do you think made the difference for you to be able to get out of poverty?

There’s no one situation that’s the same. People might like to think it’s a black and white issue — that there are specific steps you can take, follow the step here, step here, step there, and, you know, “voila,” you’ve made your way out of poverty. It’s not at all that simple.

I think there’s a combination of things. Having one parent who had some stable employment — my mother was a nurse, and she worked at what’s now Centennial Medical Center. She had some stable employment for enough of the time to be able to get our family on track. My older brother went to a magnet school down the street. I didn’t go to a magnet school, but I was lucky enough to be able to get some level of decent education, and not everyone gets that.

I had no idea what it looked like to go to college, I had no idea what it looked like to have the type of career that I have now. And I think one of the big differences for me was the kind of network that I was connected to, even though we lived in a lot of poverty. I went to a church that had individuals who worked in different fields. I was able to see an example of what it might look like to be a successful African American male. I remember there was a woman at my church who owned her own magazine, and she gave me an internship when I was about 14 years old. That was really important just to be able to see that example. Quite often if you’ve never seen anyone model that behavior, then you don’t really feel comfortable going in that direction.

It definitely has to do with people in relationships, I think is one of the biggest predictors of social mobility.

Tell me about how you got plugged in to your current job.

I was 17 when I started working in nonprofits and started working at the Martha O’Bryan Center, which was the nonprofit in my old backyard. Ever since, I got to work in community settings, a lot of schools and then a lot of youth development work. And soccer has really been growing in our communities now for the last 10, 15, even 20 years. We’ve had a pretty robust and growing international community. Today, I work with the Nashville Soccer Club. And the goal of our league is to be the most inclusive of the sports leagues. My role today is trying to find out all the ways that we can leverage our game and our clubs to make positive impacts in the community.

When you hear a statistic about how low the rate of economic mobility is here, what’s your reaction?

It really, to me, speaks to the fact that we have to take a look at our systems. Typically, the way we have tried to improve conditions for people is we focus on individuals. We say, all right, how can one person at a time, pick yourself up by your bootstraps? But when you have such a large segment of people who are not able to make those transitions, whether it’s through employment or whether it’s through education or whatever it may be, to me, it really shows that it’s a structural issue. And we as community workers and people who are practitioners in the community have to focus on our systems.

Anything else you want to add?

It’s still a struggle even for me in terms of trying to find a place in Nashville that’s affordable. There are still issues that route back from my family’s experience that we have to deal with today. I have two brothers. I have an older brother who had little bit of issues growing up, got in a little bit of trouble, but thankfully is well and able to take care of himself. I have another younger brother who was not able to escape what we call the school-to-prison pipeline. He had gotten in a lot of trouble at school. He’s probably spent over half of his adult life in prison. It just goes to show some of the side effects of poverty and some of the issues that people in those communities deal with, they don’t escape you even when you escape.