Why have past efforts to address poverty not resulted in more meaningful improvements for distressed neighborhoods?

When Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964, there was a fundamental belief that poverty was a result of people not having access to the basic necessities of life, and that the struggle to attain those necessities meant people could not invest in themselves in a way that would lead them to higher incomes and ultimately self-sufficiency. In other words, if we could just get people out of abject poverty by providing a basic safety net, they could put themselves on a path to prosperity.

The programs and initiatives that emerged based on this idea—and those that still predominate today—are reflective of that thinking. Food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, direct aid to families, and other companion programs were primarily designed to close the gap between what people actually earned in the private economy and what they needed to achieve a decent standard of living. What these programs did—and still do—is relieve the misery associated with being poor, but there is little evidence that they actually put people on a path to self-sufficiency, at least not in any systematic way.

However, more than half a century later, we are not producing young adults who are upwardly mobile with a low risk of ending up back in poverty. The President was correct in at least one regard: the struggle has been neither short nor easy. Since the mid-1960s, the overall poverty rate has remained relatively consistent. Using consumption (rather than income) based measures, the picture is more encouraging in the sense that although people are still not earning enough income to provide a decent standard of living, income transfers through government programs are ensuring that they are not living in abject poverty.

The Great Society programs and those that followed have provided access to food relief, decent housing and medical care. When Bobby Kennedy did his tour of rural poverty in Mississippi in 1967, he found desperate housing conditions and malnourished children, conditions that have largely (though not entirely) been eliminated. Of course, supplementing incomes to avoid malnutrition and homelessness was not the intent of the war on poverty.

Johnson said, “our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.” If the goal was to prevent poverty, then it is hard to argue that the war on poverty has been successful at all.

The information for this Lesson Learned is included in POVERTY AND PLACE: A Review of the Science and Research That Have Impacted Our Work, a white paper that offers an overview of selected research that has informed our thinking as we continue to fight against intergenerational urban poverty.