美国国家公共电台 NPR The American Dream Is Harder To Find In Some Neighborhoods

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

We'd like to think America is the land of equal opportunity. But that depends on exactly where in America you live. It's often said that you can predict the futures¹ of many kids by finding out the zip code where they grew up. An online data tool being made public today lets you see for yourself the link between where you are and the American dream. Here's NPR's John Ydstie.

JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE²: Economist³ Raj Chetty has been worried about the fading American dream for years. He's crunched⁴ the numbers. And they're troubling. If you were born in the 1940s or '50s, he says, you were virtually guaranteed to achieve the American dream of earning more than your parents did. But...

RAJ CHETTY: You see that for kids turning 30 today who were born in the mid-1980s - only 50 percent of them go on to earn more than their parents did. That is, it's a coin flip⁵ as to whether you are now going to achieve the American dream.

YDSTIE: Chetty and his colleagues at Opportunity Insights, a research and policy institute located at Harvard, want to improve those odds⁶. So they've partnered with the U.S. Census⁷ Bureau to develop an online program. It works a lot like a Google map. You can see the whole country. Or you can zoom⁸ into local neighborhoods. And you can click on a neighborhood and get an immense amount of data from incomes and racial makeup⁹ to marriage figures.

CHETTY: We are able to pinpoint¹⁰, you know, what are the places where we're seeing lots of kids climbing the income ladder? What are the places where the outcomes don't look as good? And we've put this all out in the form of a publicly available, interactive¹¹ tool called the Opportunity Atlas¹² that we hope citizens, local policymakers, nonprofits, people working on these issues can use to make better decisions.

YDSTIE: Chetty found that moving out of a neighborhood with poor upward mobility¹³ to a better one increases lifetime earnings¹⁴ for low-income kids by an average of $200,000. Of course, moving a lot of people is impractical¹⁵. So the focus is on helping¹⁶ low-performing areas improve. Charlotte, N.C., has gotten a head start on this effort. Back in 2014, Chetty and his colleagues found Charlotte was dead-last out of 50 cities at providing upward mobility for low-income kids. That shocked many residents.

OPHELIA GARMON-BROWN: If you know anything about Charlotte, Charlotte wants to be No. 1.

YDSTIE: Ophelia Garmon-Brown, a prominent Charlotte physician, says that ranking ran counter to Charlotte's image of itself as a thriving banking¹⁷ center with an expanding high-tech¹⁸ sector¹⁹ and a city that's been a leader in job creation and wage growth over the past two decades.

GARMON-BROWN: I wasn't surprised that we had done poorly. I've been a physician for a lot of years, worked with people who live in poverty. So I saw it.

YDSTIE: What she saw was a segregated²⁰ city where low-income black residents especially faced little chance of moving up the economic ladder. Garmon-Brown joined an effort by the Foundation for the Carolinas to address the problem. The group identified early childhood development, college and career readiness, family stability and strong social networks as key factors that enhance upward mobility. It singled out segregation²¹ as a key obstacle. And now Charlotte officials are learning to use the Opportunity Atlas to effectively target some remedies, things like pre-K programs and affordable²² housing.

ALANNA WILLIAMS: So what I have up here right now is just kind of a pure map of median income in Charlotte.

YDSTIE: Alanna Williams, from the Chetty team, is demonstrating the Opportunity Atlas for a group that includes local officials. She zooms²⁴ into Charlotte and clicks on neighborhoods. If the area is reddish-brown, it signals low levels of upward mobility. If it's green or blue, it has higher opportunities.

WILLIAMS: So this is the outcomes for children who grew up in different tracks in Charlotte.

YDSTIE: Frank Barnes is the chief equity²⁵ officer for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. He says the tool has already exceeded his expectations.

FRANK BARNES: I think the key thing that has happened is that the Foundation for the Carolinas have brought a lot of partners to the table to think about how to act on these data. And I think that's the power. It's in the community collaboration²⁶ and the community partnership²⁷.

YDSTIE: Charlotte's effort to improve upward mobility is already taking shape at Sedgefield Middle School. It's located in a majority-white neighborhood not far from downtown Charlotte. But Assistant Principal Eric Tornfelt says the school's students are mostly black and Hispanic.

ERIC TORNFELT: So we got 48.9 percent are Hispanic - 44.5 percent are African-American. Four percent are white.

YDSTIE: It's not unusual for a public school in Charlotte to have a student body that's largely minority. That's because many white students attend private schools or public schools outside their neighborhoods. That segregation hinders upward mobility. James E. Ford²³, a former North Carolina teacher of the year, is working with Sedgefield's administration to make the school more racially balanced. Ford, now an education consultant²⁸, says two local elementary schools have already merged²⁹ for that reason.

JAMES E. FORD: Eventually, something similar is going to happen here. The demographics here are going to shift quite a bit. It's majority-black and -brown now. But in the coming years, it'll change. It'll start to look more like the neighborhood.

YDSTIE: But there's another challenge here beyond segregation. It's the lack of social networks minority children need to succeed. The Sedgefield neighborhood is more affluent³⁰ than a nearby majority-black neighborhood called Southside Park. But the Opportunity Atlas shows African-American boys growing up in Sedgefield in the 1980s and '90s are now doing worse than their counterparts from Southside Park. Ford says that might surprise some people.

FORD: We may assume because an area's affluent, like, that's a high-opportunity area. Well, the truth is that may not be a high-opportunity area, according to all the metrics that we're looking at.

YDSTIE: In this case, it may be that the majority-black neighborhood of Southside Park offers young, black men the social networks, friends, extended family, churches that help them get ahead. Those kinds of networks might not be accessible to them in a majority-white neighborhood. Ford says the Opportunity Atlas should help reduce misconceptions about economic mobility.

FORD: So this permits us to start making really smart and really intentional³¹ decisions so that 20, 30 years down the line, we can look and say, yeah, that was the right call.

YDSTIE: Charlotte is already taking significant steps in that direction. Mecklenburg County, which encompasses³² Charlotte, has committed to providing pre-K for all children. The city of Charlotte has a $50 million bond issue for affordable housing on the November ballot³³. Raj Chetty says he hopes the Opportunity Atlas will help communities across the country revive the American dream in their local neighborhoods. John Ydstie, NPR News, Charlotte, N.C.

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MARTIN: You can find the Opportunity Atlas at oppurtunityatlas.org.