Growing Apart?

By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson

Poverty in paradise? Visiting the “Upper Valley” of communities centered around Dartmouth College and the famed Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center on the New Hampshire-Vermont border, and you don’t expect to hear this view from a knowledgeable observer:

“We’re witnessing a widening gap between the haves and have-nots. Some people come here and buy $700,000 hillside estates, cash. But across the town line people struggle to find any place to live. Towns like Hanover and Norwich are like gated communities, while next-door Hartford and White River Junction struggle to keep anything in the storefronts.”

Tom Kittridge, who runs The Haven homeless shelter in White River Junction, strikes a similar chord: “It’s amazing to me that in this very rich region, lots of good jobs here, there’s so much poverty. Drive around and see the beautiful mountains but so many people living on the margin, coming into our food shelves – more than 1,200 families a year. Many of these people have physical health problems, some mental health problems, but overall just really poor educational levels.”

Across New England, we heard similar stories. In New Bedford, Mass., workers from Third World countries struggle to get minimum wage jobs. In Providence, R.I., Mayor David Cicilline notes that 80 percent of public school children are living in poverty. In Holyoke, Mass., Mayor Michael Sullivan comments unhappily that his city’s principal business is “the industry of the poor” – social services for residents. In Brunswick, Maine, we are told of “a big squeeze on the working poor.”

From Boston, MassINC reports that New England has one of America’s greatest levels of income inequality. People with bachelor’s or higher degrees have seen their incomes rise dramatically – especially in two-income families – while loss of manufacturing jobs has left fewer well-paid job options for less educated people.

Nationwide Census data showed that in 2004, for the fifth year in a row, inflation-adjusted median income decreased. That means even families in the middle are seeing their actual incomes and standard of living go down.

States and cities have a tough time correcting such trends on their own. But it’s fair to ask: do New England’s time-encrusted city and town boundaries magnify inequity?

Consider Connecticut, tops in America in personal income. Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven are among the country’s very poorest central cities; some of their suburbs are among the nation’s wealthiest. The Census reports 10.5 percent of Connecticut children are living in poverty, their families – even with a full-time bread-earner – unable to afford decent housing, adequate child care or health care.

Huge city-suburban racial disparities are often diagnosed as an overriding issue separating poor and affluent communities, and no one doubts they play a major role. But Michael Bangser, former president of the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, notes that “as crucial as race is, class is becoming the larger issue. Lots of inner-ring suburbs are becoming dramatically more diverse, attracting city residents with motivation and some education. But that doesn’t change the concentration of poverty in the city.”

In the words of a Hartford city department head: “Our city is very good at importing poor people and exporting the middle class.”

At the same time, notes Jan Eastman, director of Vermont’s Snelling Center, rural New England is starting to emulate the gross income disparities of the major cities. In earlier decades, poverty tended to be spread across many rural towns; “today our demographics have shifted totally.” Over 70 percent of its school students in a regional center such as St. Johnsbury qualify for free or reduced luncheons, while the figures drop in surrounding towns. “We’re pushing our poverty to the center.”

The story in Maine is similar. The state, explains Laurie LaChance of the Maine Development Foundation, has 64 service center communities, all providing banking, medical, and library services to their regions. “But people are moving out to surrounding communities, further and further away – sometimes for more land, sometimes for lower tax rates.” The poor are left in the town centers, in older schools, even while the state from 1970 to 1995 was obliged to invest $750 million on new school construction, mostly in the suburban towns.

Can New England, where America’s first civil society and democratic values blossomed in towns of mixed incomes and mutual concern, take steps to assure a future of shared futures? Richard Godfrey, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation, says yes: “Municipal planning must accommodate housing for all incomes and family styles. Reliance on local property taxes and localized zoning decisions often favors commerce over community, and large houses over smaller ones.” A statewide or regional approach, he suggested, could “bring low- and moderate-wage earners, essential for economic growth and community vitality, back from the margins.”

But how to get there? Such solutions as regional tax-base sharing might relieve some of the inequities in schooling and services – but politicians clearly lack the will to address them, notes Jeff Blodgett of the Connecticut Economic Resource Center. Plus, with lower tax rates in suburban towns, businesses need only to move out of the center city to cut their taxes dramatically.

One hears, across the region, growing calls to expand supplies of workforce housing, not just in cities but suburban towns, partly through reform of local zoning laws or land use regulations to encourage mixed -use development. The housing non-profits in all six states are pushing to boost production, even though state appropriations to back up their efforts clearly lag far behind need.

Perhaps more targeted advocacy is needed. Julie Eades, president of New Hampshire’s Community Loan Fund, tells how her group has saved trailer parks, a prime source of lower income housing, from being sold for development with their occupants evicted. The formula: organize the tenants into a cooperative to collect rents and maintain the property, then require (as the state agreed to do) that they have first right of refusal on buying the property. The approach has proven remarkably successful: there are now 69 such coops in New Hampshire. The Loan Fund champions their cause, helps with the financing and legal steps, and advertises the energy saving qualities of the new generation of manufactured homes.

The stakes aren’t small: a balanced economy, reducing isolation, restoring New England’s historic social fabric.

[Originally published January 2006]

Photo Credit:

Rhode Island Housing

Rhode Island Housing helps low- and moderate-income Rhode Islanders find houses and apartments they can afford, such as these residences in Newport Heights, a mixed income Hope VI project.