Review by guest blogger David Atkins

The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America by Princeton University sociologist Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen offers a glimpse into the lives of many urban, working Americans who live above the official poverty line, but are not quite middle class.

This book is based on surveys and interviews between 1994-2002 and tells the stories of nine families in the New York City area, organizing those stories around these key issues:

• gentrification of neighborhoods – some are being priced out of their neighborhoods, but life is safer in the Brooklyn, NY neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill. It’s an evolving story that is not all good and not all bad.
• credit card debt – why and how it gets out of control so quickly. For some, the desperation to escape privation has been a costly temptation.
• childcare challenges – do welfare moms make better parents and community members than moms who commute hours to a factory job leaving their kids in improvised daycare?
• health care – one accident can be a ticket back to poverty
• relationships – the complex web of male/female and extended family arrangments is necessary, practical, and often dysfunctional
• bureaucracy – near poor people hate welfare as much as the rest of us and would do almost anything to avoid going back.

This is a detailed book; I found it difficult to keep track of who was whom. We meet at least 50 different people in the course of describing the lives of 9 families. I had to draft an outline of the people involved to keep the names and places straight. But what emerges from this book — most relevant to cities– are the following three key recurrent themes:

1. “Near poor” is not a transitional state. Nationally, the “near poor” represent 57 million Americans. We tend to think that poor people who work hard will eventually get ahead and achieve at least some degree of security. But the reality is that those who escape poverty often remain in an economic condition where they are working hard, but cannot advance. In any urban setting, a significant underclass is not on any track to participate in community life beyond working as hard as they can to stay above water. Urban planning these days is often about attracting talent, making cities “cool” to live in for the “creative class” or knowledge workers.

The service class and working class are the people who keep the city running. Understanding, through the anecdotal stories of these families, should help to inform planners why the urban poor and near poor are not just a problem to be dealt with, but human beings who need to be a part of the engine of progress.

2. Child care is a constant problem. The welfare reform efforts of the 1990s succeeded in getting many Americans back to work. Laziness is not a problem among the working poor. Exhaustion is. And their children are constantly in danger of falling back into poverty because of the lack of supervision and involvement from parents who are too busy working to keep the rent paid and food on the table. The near poor are not choosing to let strangers raise their kids in order to pursue a career. There is no choice, only consequence.

3. We need practical, situational solutions, not value-based policies. The stories of how people get into trouble are seldom without some blame. Credit card debt? Why do you have that plasma TV? Single mom with 2 kids and husband deported? Why did you get pregnant again? This book describes with humility and empathy how the real stories of people living and working on the edge are doing their best to survive. The policies of welfare reform in the 1990 succeeded in creating a strong incentive system to get poor people working, but people make mistakes often through lack of information and misinformation. When wealthy people make mistakes, we see it as a learning process. When the near poor make bad decisions, we are quick to judge and apply our own standards about what they should have done and accept their difficulty as the cost of their bad decisions. But a few mistakes can lead to total disaster, especially in the context of children. What is the pregnant, single mom supposed to do to support her family? Take a course in web page design? When? Who takes care of the kids? Life is not fair, OK, we all get that. So what can we do about it?

The central thesis of this book is that we ignore the near poor. They exist in a gap between those in poverty, who we feel an obligation to assist, and those who are “on track” to greater economic stability and prosperity.

Newman identifies some key policy recommendations (and note the forward by Senator John Edwards–this book is intended to provoke political change):

• Facilitate low income home ownership through innovative lending programs to give borrowers alternatives to the predatory lending practices and subprime market.
• Promote savings among the near poor with programs like Universal Savings Accounts, Individual Development Accounts, and Kids Investment and Development Savings (KIDS) Accounts.
• Support local efforts like New York’s Credit Where Credit is Due (bringing banking services to underserved neighborhoods) and Pennsylvania’s Fresh Food Financing Initiative (bringing lower cost fresh food to low income communities).
• Encourage the development of “career ladders” and support teachers who advocate for vocational programs in schools.
• Increase access to education through programs like Senator John Edwards’ College for Everyone or J. B. Schramm‘s College Summit. (College Summit is not mentioned in the book–but another example of a great idea–D.A.)

Perhaps most importantly,

“…we must replace this patchwork child-care “system” — a term it barely merits — with a comprehensive, public-supported network of day care (for kids aged six months to three years) and kindergarten (starting at four). We know that the majority of mothers of children under one are in the labor force; no amount of wishful thinking is going to change that fact.”

The most successful and effective policies identified are more projects than policies. There is no magic solution; no single national policy that should be adopted. But by getting into the details of these families, Newman helps us leap over the simplifications and notice the near poor who are a huge segment of our population that is not looking for a handout, but needs some help up.

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This review was contributed by guest blogger, Dave Atkins… a technologist and metro parent who blogs about issues affecting the creative class and their city lifestyle choices, often focusing on Boston where he now lives (after doing some time in the Bay Area and Seattle).