Gero - Blog Post 5

            A few weeks ago, I attended a talk at the Athenaeum with Harvard Professor of Economics, Raj Chetty. Professor Chetty discussed how a person’s neighborhood affects their social and economic mobility, as well as how to create opportunities for upward mobility for people in low-income neighborhoods. These people are, in Professor Shelby’s words, the ghetto poor. In addition to race as a determinant of upward mobility, Professor Chetty presented other factors like conditions of childhood, two parent homes, quality public schools, and social capital. Professor Chetty especially emphasized the importance of mixed-income neighborhoods in providing upward social mobility for low-income individuals. Moving from a low-income neighborhood (like a ghetto), to a mixed-income neighborhood caused a dramatic change in an individual’s social and economic mobility and life expectations. All of the evidence Professor Chetty provided was from small sample groups of families, far from large scale economic integration like the kind proposed by Owen Fiss (page 65).

            In encouraging mixed-income neighborhoods, Professor Chetty discussed a pilot program instituted in Seattle that provided housing grants and housing relocation assistance for families in low-income (or ghetto) neighborhoods. The program proved effective in relocating a small group of families across Seattle to increase upward mobility. While nothing close to the total reparations required to Black people, this program could be interpreted as a form of compensatory justice because it provides the means of “[bringing] one to the level of well-being they would have attained had the injustices not occurred” (page 66). Well-being here would merely be housing, which fails to provide for the entire compensation. 

Professor Shelby would likely support the use of taxpayer and government funds to support ghetto denizens but argue that the program is effectively an application of Owen Fiss’s proposal to eliminate ghettos and ghetto culture altogether. While Professor Shelby disproves residential integration as a long-term solution, could implementing programs like this be helpful for willing individuals in the short-term (page 67)? And could ghetto culture be maintained as a mixed-income neighborhood, while reaping the benefits of upward mobility?

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