I’ve written about poverty in Whitewater before, and the 2010 Census will offer fresh information on the state of Whitewater’s economy. It’s a subject that cheerleaders for the town probably wish would go away. An ordinary person would prefer economic arrangements that make poverty go away, but there you see the distinction between sensible & ordinary as against foolish & political.

I’ve emphasized three points (1) poverty is relatively higher in Whitewater than neighboring towns, (2) child poverty is terribly high here, and (3) all the grand public works projects we’ve undertaken haven’t brought those high figures down.

I emphasize our relatively greater poverty to show that as other towns do better, so we can, too. I emphasize child poverty both because it’s so damaging and because it puts lie to the contention that Whitewater’s economy looks worse because of non-working students in town. That’s not where Whitewater falls short — child per child, there’s greater economic hardship here than in other American towns, and excuse-making about this situation is unavailing.

Our grand public projects directed at the upper middle class are a waste of taxes and have not improved the conditions of those most in need. They’re merely monuments to bureaucrats’ pride and lines on officials’ resumes.

At the Wall Street Journal, there’s a Q&A about current poverty measurements, and how they’re changing. The changes in measurement are significant, but the extent of change from one measure to another can be tempered with a comparison of relative conditions between cities, using either measure.

Economist Bruce Meyer discusses the impending changes, and what he likes and doesn’t about them, in a story entitled, Q&A: Rethinking U.S. Poverty Measure.

From Madison’s Isthmus, one reads a story about hardship in nearby Janesville, hardship that should be of concern to those in Whitewater, too.

No matter how dire the conditions for Janesville now, I believe that an abandonment of virtually every aspect of commercial and business regulation, along with drastic reductions in government spending except principally for police and fire, could yet make the city attractive as one large enterprise zone.

(I think the Isthmus‘s description is accurate, but it’s implied prescription of a public works solution is mistaken. Local press and business ideas relying on private solutions are more realistic.)

One thing’s certain – incremental efforts and conventional solutions will not be enough to mitigate current suffering from poverty and unemployment.

See, Janesville on the Brink.

Reason.tv: Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey — The Decline of a Once-Great City

Here’s the first full episode of Drew Carey’s series on Cleveland, and ways to revitalize the city.

Sixty years ago, Cleveland was a booming city full of promise, opportunity, and people. Today, the city’s population is less half of what it was in its prime and it ranks as one of the poorest big cities in the United States. Hometown hero Drew Carey reflects on how the city became “the mistake on the lake” and wonders about the city’s future.

Link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=096pjEOrdK4&feature=player_embedded

Drew Carey has a series at Reason.tv about his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland’s a big place, but Carey’s proposals for revitalizing his town would apply to other places in the Midwest, including far smaller ones.

Here’s an introduction to his series:

Click …to watch Drew introduce the series that just might save his hometown. And yours.

Reason Saves Cleveland with Drew Carey is written and produced by Paul Feine; camera and editing by Roger Richards and Alex Manning; music by the Cleveland band Cats on Holiday.

The video below is a collection of scenes from the series, but it shows briefly both the beauty and decay of contemporary Cleveland.

Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBI02nn6X0s&feature=player_embedded

Over at the online Capital Times, there’s a story entitled, Despite Madison’s Relative Affluence, Poverty Rate Growing Rapidly.

Here’s an excerpt:

Being poor, hungry or unemployed is a world far removed for many in Wisconsin’s capital city, where arguments over passenger rail, Badger sports or high-rise hotels can dominate the news.

But the reality is Madison’s poverty rate is climbing – rising nine times faster than the rate of other U.S. cities, according to a new report from the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.

Since 2000, the poverty rate (defined as a family of four with an income under $21,800) in Madison has jumped from 15 percent to 17.7 percent. That?s one in every six residents.

Perhaps more significantly, the city has seen an explosion in the number of low-income children as measured by participation in subsidized or free-lunch programs. One of every two students in the Madison Metropolitan School District is now considered ?low income? using the lunch standard. In 1990, just one in five Madison school kids qualified.

“It’s very much a part of the changing demographics in the district,” says Madison school Superintendent Daniel Nerad.

And the overall picture is not improving. In its report, Brookings predicts Madison will likely see its poverty rate jump another 1.1 percent this year, surpassing the average poverty rate for the 95 largest U.S. cities.

It’s a complicated issue. Certainly, the slumping economy has strained many family budgets. Others point to overwhelmed social services and a lack of job-training programs. Some blame an influx of low-income residents from the big cities of Chicago or Milwaukee.

But one thing is clear to Elizabeth Kneebone, senior researcher at Brookings, one of the nation’s oldest think tanks: “Madison has historically done better than a lot of places but we are seeing a significant increase in poverty,” she says.

Measuring poverty in college towns can be somewhat misleading, researchers caution, since many students live below the poverty line and are counted by the U.S. Census Bureau as officially “poor” even if they come from wealthy families.

But Kneebone says students don’t account for the growing number of poor residents in Madison. According to the American Community Survey, an annual estimate from the Census Bureau, Madison added nearly 8,400 residents living below the poverty line between 2000 and 2008, a 29 percent increase….

There’s little argument the recession has pushed more Wisconsin families into poverty. The state’s overall poverty rate has climbed from 8.7 to 10.7 percent since 2000. The national rate also increased, from 12.4 to 13.1 percent over that same period.

The focus on child poverty is sound, as children are particularly vulnerable, and that focus on family and children in Whitewater is one that I’ve written about consistently. See, the focus on family poverty from a series I previously even posted.

We have a campus, but college students are not the reason we have an above-average poverty rate for Whitewater. We have a high-rate of family and child poverty.

Although we’re a small town, and poverty statistics are not compiled so frequently for us as they are for larger towns, our high rate must be higher still since the recession.

Sadly, Madison faces a problem we also face: talk about big projects while large numbers of children are impoverished, and as poverty rates increase. The coexistence of big-ticket construction projects while many are indigent is a sign of a disordered and diseased economy.

It’s more common in the third world than elsewhere, a sign of unproductive economic relationships and the vanity of project-hungry bureaucrats. It might seem odd, that Whitewater’s bureaucrats talk with sanctimoniously about their work, its supposed uniqueness and extraordinary nature, while so many in this rural town struggle, if only one would consider the contrast between words and conditions.

These projects don’t improve life for ordinary people the way free, mutually beneficial exchange in the marketplace does; they are ornaments mostly to the pride of managers and planners.

We have no reason to scoff at Madison, or the third world — our own small community makes similar mistakes.

From the Gazette story, the difficult circumstances nearby communities face:

Dan Stein, president and CEO of Second Harvest of Southern Wisconsin, said the number of people facing hunger has increased across the state, but the situation is particularly dire in the southwestern part of the Wisconsin.

“Throughout the state, the numbers were between 30 and 50 percent, but here, it’s 83 percent,” he said. “There are a lot of reasons for that.”

Stein said unemployment has wreaked havoc on many communities in southwestern Wisconsin, particularly in communities such as Janesville and Beloit. More people know someone—a relative, a friend, a neighbor—who has lost a job and is struggling to make ends meet, he said.

Before the budget, before the municipal administration, politicians, bureaucrats, and back-patters, is a city of fourteen-thousand. Most of these fourteen-thousand have, sensibly, more important concerns than the latest, supposedly extraordinary and exceptional (excuse me, exceptional! bureaucratic achievement.

Little over a month ago, there was a rare mention, for Whitewater, of (child) poverty. Our poverty rate is high, but it’s traditionally been impolitic to discuss as much. We live in a city where about one in four children live in poverty and distress.

I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that the way out for Whitewater is an abandonment of over-bearing regulation, fussy management, manipulative and coercive partnerships with a mediocre municipal administration, and instead through the chance to make Whitewater a center of opportunity, in reality, and not merely in rhetoric.

Our comparative and attractive advantage should rest with how little we interfere with productive, and private, initiatives. No grant, no public borrowing, no taxes, will ever be as useful as the energies of productive, private citizens to build, grow, donate, and enrich.

Even those who’d advocate another alternative must see that incremental, marquee projects have made no difference to the fundamental condition of thousands in Whitewater. These projects, at taxpayer expense and though public borrowing, are mere ornaments to bureaucratic pride. They’re screens, curtains, and diversions from the real condition of thousands in the city.

We live in this small city, and go about political discussions within it, as though we were something we’re not, so eager are we to herald every supposed project as proof that we lead the state, nation, whatever.

We’ll not improve this way; those who trumpet these supposed bureaucratic triumphs are incredible to sensible people. That’s because ordinary people live and experience conditions unlike the
sugary and empty claims of our town’s politicians and career bureaucrats.

They’re talking only to themselves, and a small circle of others, in a city of thousands.

http://www.blip.tv/file/2632278

[This is the fourth in a series on poverty in Whitewater. Part 1 showed that we have a family poverty rate far higher than surrounding communities. Part 2 showed that the poverty rate of our families is increasing. Part 3 showed that the problems of poverty cannot be understood through residents' ancestries.]

We are fortunate to have some growth in Whitewater, and part of that growth has come from new shopping center development, on both sides of the city (and it is to be hoped, downtown, too). If we have that obvious growth in retail space, why has poverty among families in Whitewater been rising over the last decade?

It’s because retail growth — even much more than we’ve had — would not have a decisive, immediate impact on poverty. The stores that will lease space in these new shopping strips will employ few workers, and certainly less than a light-industrial plant would. Retail shops will create both temporary (construction) and permanent (staff and service) jobs, but not nearly so many as a new factory.

Currently, Whitewater has a problem like some ‘low-aggregate-growth’ cities have – new retail space cannibalizes old, or otherwise does not amount to a cumulative lift for the community. We have a considerable amount of vacant space in Whitewater, and much of it may be vacant long after the new shopping centers on the eastside of town are filled. These now-vacant storefronts were once filled, but we can no longer encourage new businesses to lease space in them.

New shopping centers are progress. It’s just that they’re not a comprehensive solution, and I doubt that many think they could be. They represent gains, to be sure. They should not be expected to reduce the percentage of poor families in the Whitewater. When that number drops appreciably, and consistently, year after year, we will have reason to breathe easier.

Some communities with quaint downtown areas are not suitable models for Whitewater. Delafield has a quaint downtown district, but I cannot imagine anyone thinking that Delafield’s prosperous homeowners are prosperous because Delafield has nice downtown shops. Delafield may owe its success to a downtown, it’s just not Delafield’s downtown retail district; it’s Milwaukee’s downtown office district. The combination of interstate access and a role as a bedroom community to Milwaukee gives Delafield advantages that we do not have.

Cambridge, smaller and closer, is quaint, too. Cambridge has tried to position itself a destination for art, and it’s had some success in that regard. That’s a fragile niche, though. Cambridge’s economy felt the strain of an early 2000s recession, being dependent on sales that consumers postponed during those uncomfortable times.

Some retail shops may attract more retailers, if they’re complimentary niche shops, and if the access limitations to customers (from the bypass, for example) are not too inhibiting for new prospects. Attracting light industry, though, is another matter. We could use more light factories, but the decision (a risk in any case) to build a plant somewhere puts more at stake than a pleasant downtown will satisfy.

No one I’ve ever met, though, proposes that Whitewater’s problems would be solved were it to become a destination for patrons of art. Even the biggest supporters of this sort of offering from Whitewater see that it’s only part of a broader effort at economic development.

(As for that broader effort, I’ll not venture into a tax incremental financing discussion here, except to say the several new TIF districts in the city are not development; they’re merely the authorization of municipal expenditures through debt in the hope of spurring private development, of whatever district type.)

I, and others, will benefit from many of the new shops in Whitewater, with a greater selection of choice items, specialized from green grocers, meat markets, etc. I know that there can be something delightful about shopping for specific goods, from merchant to merchant. It’s French, at least before the hypermart. It is all very quaint, but then I have the luxury of appreciating something quaint. If my wife and I pay more, for being in a lovely little town, walking about with a mesh bag for our fresh fruit and vegetables, flowers, etc., we’re surely contented. Ambiance is as legitimate a component of a market price as any other.

These small aspects of upper middle class life are just that: aspects, and made most enjoyable when all else is well. It’s not that they’re not important (they’re a matter of success or failure for the butcher, baker, etc.). A well-ordered community – that is, one with a robust, spontaneous order – will have strength and growth in several sectors of its economy simultaneously.

[This is the third of a series on poverty in Whitewater. Part 1 showed that we have a family poverty rate far higher than surrounding communities. Part 2 showed that the poverty rate of our families is increasing.]

Over the years, I have met people — at least a dozen — who have tried to argue that Whitewater is economically troubled because it has a cultural, ethnic minority that somehow — no one ever has a clear explanation — inhibits community prosperity. Almost to a person, these few have also warned that Delavan is a dangerous example for Whitewater. They say it as though we should rue the prospect of what supposedly befell Delavan.

Then or now, comparisons between Whitewater or Delavan point (1) to the ways that Delavan has had success, not failure, and (2) show without any doubt that ancestry has not played a discernible role in the economic fortunes of that town, or ours.

In my earlier posts on poverty, I have stuck to what’s most likely to be telling and meaningful: a community’s overall poverty rate, the rate of poverty among families, and trends of those two rates.

FREE WHITEWATER is a blog of brief commentary, not lengthy policy analysis. I have not set out to blog about anything more than general commentary on Whitewater, Wisconsin. There are blogs that do handle discussion of poverty-related policy well. (A blogger like Mickey Kaus, in and apart from his kausfiles posts at Slate.com, has offered some solid analysis of welfare reform, and made a name for himself that way, for example.)

Nonetheless, if anyone wanted to venture an opinion about poverty is this town of fourteen thousand, a look at economic performance and the ancestry & ethnicity of our fellow residents would be the worst place to start. An enumeration of the different ethnic groups within Whitewater gives no insight into causes or effects. If I learn that there are a number of Norwegians in Whitewater, it’s of no help in determining economic performance in town.

Delavan is the refutation to those who think that ancestry makes a difference. We’re a community with, by the figures of the U.S. Census bureau to which the City of Whitewater links on its website, 10.6 of our residents in poverty. Yet, only about 7-8 percent of our number are ethnic minorities by the contemporary understanding of the term. Most especially, the idea that we’ve so many poor because we have an appreciable minority community in Whitewater is false, and false in a way that’s a hopeless red herring. In Delavan, using the same data that our city uses, 23 percent of people were ethnic minorities in 1999, yet Delavan had a poverty rate for families of only 5.7 percent. That’s right – a far larger minority community than ours, but far lower poverty. (Looking at it differently, one might as easily make the mistake of thinking that Delavan’s doing better because it has a larger ethnic minority community, or fewer residents of European ancestry.)

Delavan’s situation is obviously different — and better — in ways that have nothing to do with ancestry. If we’re looking for demographics that help inform an understanding of Whitewater’s economic condition, we would probably look anywhere except ancestry. (Delavan’s economic situation, by the way, is likely better since these figures, considering the overall growth that she has experienced. Yet, even years ago, when some mistakenly held Delavan out as a bad example, she had fewer impoverished residents than we did.)

Perhaps that’s why few cities list economic statistics and ancestry on their webpages. The former webpages of the CDA and the City of Whitewater didn’t do the subject justice, either. Crude statistics about ancestry (and especially about income and ancestry, as the CDA formerly posted), are nearly useless. You’ll always have a few people who will seize the ancestry figures to argue that some small groups are responsible for the town’s overall difficulties. An overall poverty rate will tell you something about how a community is faring, but trying to determine causes of poverty in a small town through a list of income by ethnic groups is just speculation. A city should not be accountable for the distorted use of its statistics; a city should be accountable for recognizing that the demographics it displays have limited or no policy value (and undermine efforts to look beyond ethnicity).

We can restore our community to broad-based prosperity by rejecting the hidebound, narrow views that hold sway among some of us. When we abandon the failed notion that we can restrict, regulate, code-enforce, and spend our way out of Whitewater’s predicament we will be able to improve our condition, and that of all our fellow residents.

Next in the series: Poverty in Whitewater, Part 4: If we keep building new shopping centers, why does Whitewater’s poverty rate not decrease?

[This is the second of a series on poverty in Whitewater. Part 1 showed that we have a family poverty rate far higher than surrounding communities.]

Previously, in Part 1, I used the same census data that the City of Whitewater posted on its website to show that we have a family poverty rate roughly twice that of surrounding towns. In this post, we’ll review the annual data on family poverty that the Whitewater Unified School District posts. Those data show that – each year over the last ten – family poverty in the district has stayed constant or increased as a percentage of all families.

I’ll begin with a few preliminary remarks. First, although school district data are for all the communities in the district, Whitewater is – naturally – by far the largest contributor to the data. The City of Whitewater dwarfs in size all the other communities that comprise the WUSD.

Second, the district presents annual information from the last ten years, and that gives us a good impression of the trend. Third, the district’s measure is more significant than the overall family poverty rate, because the district data pertains specifically to those families with children of school age – children being powerless to advance their own circumstances, and being especially vulnerable to the life-altering prospects of an upbringing in poverty.

From 1997-1998 through 2006-2007, there has been a marked increase in the percentage of children of impoverished families with the WUSD.:

From 1997-1998 to 2006-2007, the increase from 21% to 27% represents a staggering jump of over twenty-five percent in the percentage of children within the district in poverty.

In no year during the last ten did the percentage of poverty among school age children ever decline. Not once. We have made no gains against poverty levels, unless one would wish to claim dubiously that conditions might otherwise have grown even worse.

This situation should be a source of chagrin: we have more poor families by percentage than neighboring towns, and more poor families with school-age students than a decade ago. How often have you heard people in town ridicule other nearby towns, aesthetically or culturally? You know, and I know, that smug residents of Whitewater look down on Palmyra and Jefferson, etc. Our situation is – in one of the ways that should matter – so troubled that we have no reason to ridicule any other places.

America is awash in prosperity, and national poverty figures are down from the year before. America has seen year after year of economic growth, and those increases in aggregate wealth produced a decline in poverty in America. We live the most productive nation in all the world, now or ever before. Our vast commercial republic is a sophisticated, technologically advanced place, producing well over a dozen trillion dollars annually. Free markets have lifted this nation to a high peak, and produced in hundreds of millions a standard of living others seek to achieve.

Paradoxically, while America waxes, Whitewater wanes. Look around at our many advantages, and recognize the truth they reveal: even with hospitable physical conditions, and a university campus, we lag nearby towns. We’re no distant desert town, or remote Alaskan village, and yet with all we have, we’ve done less than we should have. For every salary increase, additional public-sector employee, or overly-intrusive regulatory effort, our condition has grown, in meaningful ways, no better – it’s grown worse.

We are, without the slightest reasonable doubt, a beautiful but troubled city. It’s unmistakable that our economy falls short for many, and I will support this contention more conclusively than any happy, but deceptive, pictures from another website, or city publication, could suggest otherwise. We have become a proud, arrogant place, willing to trumpet chimerical economic gains while many would not eat sufficiently each night without our food pantry and local churches for support.

That’s the truth that few want to address. In the richest, most productive, vibrant nation on earth, the envy of the world, Whitewater should be thriving. Instead the over-regulated and over-managed economy in this small town is so anemic that we cannot even generate growth to keep everyone fed through their own means.

We cannot honestly be boastful and fair at the same time. During July’s Homecoming, I saw a banner stretched across Main Street, that said something to the effect of, “How Does Whitewater Look to You?” The answer was supposed to be, I suppose, “great,” or wonderful,” etc. I’d say that the parts of the town where the Homecoming trolley did not go look impoverished and hungry. That’s Whitewater, too; it’s just not the part of Whitewater that suits a boastful town faction.

I could follow the city’s lead, and rush out as a cheerleader for the status quo, but I have no inclination to pad my resume with tissue-paper accomplishments while nearly adamantine problems face us.

The City of Whitewater has helpfully linked to a U.S. Census document measuring basic conditions in Whitewater as of the last census. Thanks much, city officials: I’ll use this document as the starting point for my discussion.

At the time of the last census, the document lists our resident population as 13,437. Of that number, we are 6,569 of men, 6,868 of women, 1,656 under age 18, and 11,781 over age 18. The document lets visitors know that we are 1,207 of Norwegian ancestry, 5,620 of German ancestry, and 458 of Italian descent, as though it should matter.

So how are all those Norwegians, Germans, and Italians doing? The document tells us that 10.6 percent of Whitewater families are in poverty. Sadly and inexcusably, that’s over one in ten. We couldn’t field a football team without likely having one impoverished player on the roster. In your church, look no farther than the next pew, and you’ll find someone in poverty. When he leaves afterward, he’ll go home to a different situation from ours. (I would guess, though, that he’ll not feel the same way others might about the self-congratulatory approach that is the standard at the Whitewater Municipal Building, or in a local website.)

Let’s use the same year’s census figures, available at www.census.gov, and see how other nearby towns were faring:

Fort Atkinson: population, 3.9% of families in poverty

Jefferson: population, 5.4% of families in poverty

Delavan: population, 5.7% of families in poverty

Palmyra: population, 3.4% of families in poverty

Whitewater shows — by far — the highest rate of poverty in the area, using the same census data that the city website uses for Whitewater.

Next: Poverty in Whitewater, Part 2: How many of our families have been in poverty more recently, since the last census data?