Poverty Paper

In September, Merilynn Bourne, Executive Director of the Listen Center approached my Geography major advisor, Richard Wright, about a poverty economic snapshot of the Upper Valley. When he heard that about my 1982 Social Entrepreneur Fellowship, he thought that this would be a fantastic opportunity for me to attain an academic foundation for my work at the Family Place and with MicroCredit NH. I teamed up with Charlie Grant ’11 to write the piece according to guidelines received from Merilynn’s team about certain Census data that they wanted updated in order to update the Listen Center’s service and better serve its target population. The paper is sustainable piece of my project for it actively aids the Listen Center in understanding the Upper Valley’s unique labor market, poverty genealogy, and distinct poverty conditions such as the burden of amassing heating and transportation. 

Below is the papers abstract, introduction, and employment snapshot. Let me know if you'd like to see the entire paper!

Abstract

Rural poverty in America lacks visibility. Unlike its urban counterpart, rural settings exacerbate factors of poverty such as transportation and access to institutional support. The Connecticut River’s “Upper Valley” region exhibits a unique physical geography and economic landscape. This paper critically examines poverty in the Upper Valley, focusing on domestic poverty genealogy, labor market ecology, and the spatial dimensions of poorness. It aims to refresh understandings of poverty using data from the American Community Survey, a yearly estimate coordinated by the U.S. Census. With time still left before the release of next year’s Census data, the decade’s turbulent times and recent economic crisis urges a renewed understanding of the country’s poverty landscape. This report will help local service providers contextualize and measure community need in the Upper Valley.

Introduction

Poverty is complicated to quantify and measure. Many view poverty as a barometer of economic health, particularly attuned to employment and income. Income-based litmus tests, however, obscure other meaningful measurements of poverty. Though unemployment and low income certainly inhibit the affordability of basic needs, poverty statistics assessing those two conditions do not adequately illustrate the tangled causes and effect flows of poverty. For instance, contextual realities such as domestic violence, unaffordable housing, lack of transportation, and unavailable childcare are not always captured by summary statistics, but they significantly shape poverty’s severity, spatial extent, and timeline. A narrow focus on income also deflects from identifying poverty’s problematic roots and ripple effects.  

Since 2000, when the U.S. Census Bureau last conducted a census survey, the country has experienced turbulent economic times. In early 2000, the dot-com bubble, which defined the 1990’s economic boom times, loudly burst.  Having underestimated the evolution of the Internet, many tech companies that populated initial public offerings listings in the late ‘90’s reported huge losses through and outright folded in the first few years of the new millennium. In late 2001, Al Quaeda’s terrorist attacks relaunched the country’s economic slump. First pronounced in the airline and tourism industries, the downturn later extended into a national deficit, as the United States bore (and continues to bear) the cost of international warfare in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In 2007, the American economy witnessed another bubble burst; this time, that of commercial and residential real estate and mis-rated mortgage-backed securities. The ripple effects of this rupture crashed the stock market and begetted an international credit crisis, whose magnitude compared to that of the Great Depression.

The decade’s turbulent times and recent economic crisis urges a renewed understanding of the country’s process of wealth creation and poverty landscape. This study examines poverty and its place-specific context in the rural landscape of the Upper Connecticut River Valley to gain a fuller understanding of the years what has transpired since the last intensive round of data collection.  This report provides a mixed-methods study to help local service providers grasp pivotal causes of fluctuations in the poverty rate timeline over the past two decades. With this examination, readers will anticipate a more accurate economic snapshot captured in Census 2010 and better contextualize community poverty dynamics in the Upper Valley.

Employment Snapshot

Economic restructuring in most rural economies has meant a transition from extraction industries towards the service sector. Whereas rural places formerly had to adapt and overcome economic booms and busts in agriculture, mining, and timber industries, they now have to harmonize with technological advancement, communications systems, and economies of scale that are crucial to service sector industries. Although there has been considerable service sector growth in rural areas, many jobs are disproportionately located in low-wage consumer and personal services (Tickamyer & Duncan 1990:80). Further, many of these service occupations provide few and limited benefits and are sensitive to seasonal cycles (Churilla, 2008: 2).

             To understand the dynamics of poverty in a place, we must pay attention to how labor markets structure opportunity (Tickamyer & Duncan, 1990: 79.) The labor market “has the greatest structural effect on inequality and poverty", and contains "mechanisms [such as] labor markets, capital markets, property markets that distribute economic resources" (Kodras, 1997:69).  For rural areas, “labor markets provide the link between the economic outcomes for individuals, families, and households, and the macro-level operation of the economy described by the applications of theories of uneven development” (Tickamyer & Duncan, 1990: 80). While physical resources often shape rural poverty’s existence, so do social resources. Socio-spatial isolation excludes poor families from information networks and thus prevents them from learning about job opportunities and geographically accessible, economically affordable daycare (Lichter and Parisi, 2008: 4). Often, other basic support systems such a low-rent housing market are also essential buttresses of employment attainment and maintenance (Briggs et al, 2007: 22). 

            According to anecdotal reports conducted by service providers, as well as Census and yearly ACS data, Upper Valley incomes have increased over the past fifteen years.  The number of households earning annual incomes in excess of $75,000 has increased and fewer people earn under $30,000 (Upper Valley Report, 9). On the high income scales, the towns in the center of the Upper Valley had a disproportionate percent of households earning over $150,000 annually relative to those on the periphery (Upper Valley Report, 2008: 9). This stems from the high concentration of educated and wealthy individuals around Hanover and Lebanon, where employees at Dartmouth College and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, as well as wealthy retirees often to take up residence. Towns with relatively high (six to seven) percent of households receiving public support include Windsor, Sharon, Vershire, Lyme, and Pomfret, many of which lie on the periphery of the Upper Valley region (Upper Valley Report, 2008: 9).