False Choice: The New Spatial Politics of Poverty

Posted by University of Pennsylvania on November 24, 2014

False Choice: The New Spatial Politics of Poverty
University of Pennsylvania, College Hall, Room 205
Friday, December 12 – 12:00 – 1:30pm

Margaret Weir
Professor of Sociology and Political Science and Avice M. Saint Chair in Public Policy at the
University of California, Berkeley

FOR MORE THAN THREE DECADES, the policies that set the menu of opportunities and obstacles for poor and near-poor Americans have operated on false premises. Federal programs have assumed that low-income people face few barriers in searching out opportunities and exercising choice in the free market, even as state and local policymakers have created numerous spatial barriers that have made employment, social services, and other opportunities costly, difficult, or impossible to access. Moreover, federal policies have ignored the need to build supportive institutions to assist low-income Americans, assuming that private organizations will emerge when and where new needs appear. But dwindling federal funds, local indifference, and weak local capacities have meant that organizations designed to assist low-income people are overburdened, poorly located, or simply do not exist. Drawing on the cases of Chicago and Atlanta, as well as on national data on nonprofit organizations, Weir considers the disjuncture between federal programs directed at low-income people and the local spatial barriers that confront them.

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sspf/event/2014/margaret-weir