A decade after the Chetty Study, ‘It’s like we’re losing’

RS COMMUNICATIONS

Sherri Chisholm, executive director of Leading On Opportunity, said the development of quantitative data to measure upward mobility in Charlotte will provide a means to measure success or failure of initiatives on building economic equity.

A 2014 study on intergenerational economic mobility shocked Charlotte.

Research by Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded Charlotte was last in economic mobility among the 50 largest U.S. cities and Mecklenburg County 99th out of 100. In essence, children born poor here were more likely to die that way for lack of opportunity.

While the Chetty Study, named after its author, Raj Chetty, a researcher, professor and economist at Harvard, was a wake-up call to some, others – especially in Charlotte’s Black community – saw it as confirmation of what they already knew. Millions have been invested through public-private partnerships, pledges made, and new initiatives launched since, but can opportunity be quantified?

According to the American Community Survey published in January, poverty has declined in the 14-county Charlotte region. Union has the lowest rate at 6.9%, while Anson is the highest at 19.3%. Cleveland and Chester (S.C.) counties are over 18%. The average rate for the region is 12.7% – which is better than the United States as a whole, where 36% of counties showed improvement.

Charlotte, which has a population of 875,000, has a median household income of $74,100, according to the Big Cities Health Inventory Data Platform; 11.7% of residents live below the federal poverty level of $15,060 for an individual or $31,200 for a family of four. The national rate is 12.5%.

Black Charlotteans, who make up 35% of the city’s population, are skeptical of any meaningful progress.

“More people want to come to Charlotte to live because it’s more of a city, but it’s pushing the people who have been here and loved the city out the way,” said Quay Brown, a single mother who earns $21 an hour at Coca-Cola Consolidated. “It’s more like they’re catering to the higher class and businesspeople.”

Leading on Opportunity, an initiative launched in 2017 by Foundation For The Carolinas, leverages relationships with community partners on social capital initiatives like early childcare, family stability and college and career readiness. It also acknowledges racial segregation’s link to generational poverty.

LOO executive director Sherri Chisholm said developing a universal language to describe and evaluate economic mobility was the first step. Its task force published a 2017 report that made recommendations on how to respond.

“How do we know if we’re getting better or worse given the programming that we’re putting towards economic mobility, and the dollars and the policy that we're all implementing or giving towards that work,” she said. “We knew that as much as it was important to have quantitative data, we also wanted to be informed by a community perspective.”

LOO’s council includes county and city officials, business leaders and non-profit organizations. The task force also held listening sessions across Charlotte.

“What matters is folks’ lived experience; what they feel has changed,” Chisholm said. “What are they seeing in their lives? My team is able to bring those two pieces of data together with a data methodology that says if you blend these two things together then here's a picture of how we're doing.”

LOO’s Opportunity Compass, launched in 2022, measures priority areas in a visual format. As for the recommendations, Chisholm said there was a positive response from the community.

“The community was tremendously excited,” she said. “They have rallied around it as a community initiative unlike any other initiative in recent history, and there was a lot of hope from the business sector, from the nonprofit sector, from philanthropy, from government; that if we all rallied around this, these shared recommendations, that we would see collective progress.”

Chisholm, who compares economic mobility to physical fitness, said the recommendations are a roadmap to narrowing equity gaps.

“Economic mobility is the measure of is this next generation doing better than the current generation,” she said. Improvements in economic mobility are really basic, like housing, education and then also access to a network that can help you with that. Those things will always be true.”

Though Brown earns nearly three times the federal minimum wage of $7.50 an hour, she considers herself working class. At 19, Brown was added to the waitlist for Section 8 housing. She’s still on it.

“When I try to seek assistance, they say you’re not poor enough,” Brown said, explaining that she was told the maximum income requirement for a two-person household is $21,000 before taxes. “Rent is $1,200. It’s like you want me to stay outside in a box. It’s like they’re telling you you’re not poor enough, but you have to make three times the rent for a lot of places.”

Brown, who said she rented a one-bedroom apartment for $475 a month in 2013, is considering a second job.

“Life is so short, but I’m spending all of my life at work,” she said.

Brenda Erwin has lived in the Belmont neighborhood all her life. At 63, she is on disability after a back injury forced her quit working at a hosiery mill. She lives with and takes care of her mother, who is in her 90s.

Erwin is among the many elderly, Black working-class people at risk of displacement by gentrification. Athletic fields and bars have sprung up in Belmont, but essential amenities like grocery stores are lacking. The mill where she worked has been converted to luxury apartments.

“I love my community, but I have seen it go,” Erwin said. “It’s like we’re losing. Don’t forget who helped build this place. Save space for us to enjoy life.”

Leading on Opportunity’s task force report acknowledges the role government and corporations played in maintaining inequity for profit through tactics like redlining Black neighborhoods to limit investment. Conversely, desegregation created opportunities in “a previously unexplored market.”

“They don’t care about the color of your skin, they care that your money’s green,” said Federico Rios, a member of FFTC’s leadership council and Charlotte’s former officer of diversity, equity and inclusion. “So, it creates an opportunity for organizations to come together and leverage that money for better outcomes.”

In acknowledging the value of public-private partnerships, Rios sees his role as maintaining “balance with community-focused organizations.”

In a similar vein, Rios, senior vice president of the Robinson Center for Civic Leadership, said community leaders in historically disinvested neighborhoods like Historic West End have long insisted on capitalization afforded affluent neighborhoods. The tricky part is mitigating displacement.

“It’s not an easy fix and there is no formula to expect people to stay there once that money does start coming in,” Rios said.

Rios pointed to initiatives to create economic opportunity such as LISC Charlotte’s Housing Opportunity Impact Fund and Charlotte’s $50 million affordable housing trust fund, access to universal pre-kindergarten in Mecklenburg County, and the Mayor’s Racial Equity Initiative.

“No other community in the country has made an effort like Charlotte has,” Rios said.

Timothy Hager, vice president of communications for FFTC, says he understands the frustration from some Charlotteans.

“It’s fair to be cynical,” he said. “We’re not seeing the results we’d like.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, which had a palpable effect on the global economy, also impacted local efforts to address inequity.

“The pandemic changed the trajectory of philanthropy,” Rios said. “Where we are now isn’t where we could have been had the pandemic not happened.”

But overall, Rios said the initiatives’ impact will take more than a decade to measure.

“We’re not really going to know the impact until my kids’ kids,” he said.

Chisholm agreed.

“What we're seeing 10 years later is that we have made incremental improvements. If you look at the Opportunity Compass, in just about all the metrics, we're trending in a positive direction,” she said. “Progress across economic mobility is very slow. It's not something that happens quarter over quarter, or within a year; it's something that happens quarter century over a quarter century. We need to be looking at multiple decades at a time. So, the short answer is yes, we've seen improvement, and we still have a long way to go.”

Ismaail Qaiyim, an attorney with the Queen City Community Law Firm and advocate with the Housing Justice Coalition, points to research by UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute and Mecklenburg County on homelessness that “everything’s worse,” he said.

“There’s no serious commitment to helping working class or poor people from the powers that be of the city,” said Qaiyim, who grew up in Clanton Park. “The visibility of Black working-class Charlotte has diminished. These are the direct results of policy decisions that basically favor the investment and capital pouring into the city, expansion of the tax base and expansion of economic growth on behalf of the private sector.

“The regulatory process primarily exists to benefit corporations, and that’s a very clear policy choice that’s been made. …It’s very clear that the 2040 plan is to promote economic growth, and that’s clearly at the expense of the Black and brown working class.”

North Carolina makes inclusionary zoning more difficult through Dillon’s Law, which means local governments can only regulate areas in which they have authority. To mandate low-income housing in new market-rate developments, they must ask the General Assembly for permission.

“Our need has never been as great as it is today,” said Carol Hardison, CEO of Crisis Assistance Ministry. “If we could’ve frozen Charlotte back in 2014 and address the problems then, that’d be one thing; but the city never stopped growing. It’s kind of like we’re trying to build the plane while we’re flying it. It’s strange, because low-income people are the core of the economy, but they’re the same people we seek to reduce for increased productivity.”

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