About this episode

We explore the resurgence of interest in rural communities. We delve into the current state of rural research, uncovering the gaps compared with urban research. We dive into the legacies of the deepest poverty in America and the mechanisms through which it persists. We’ll hear from Luke Shaefer, coauthor of a new book, The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America about the poorest places in the country—from Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts, and South Texas—to examine the inequalities shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility and develop a multidimensional Index of Deep Disadvantage. Using a data-driven approach, Luke Shaefer has sought to understand what these places have in common and the potential for positive change. However, for real transformation to occur, evidence-based policies tailored to each unique rural landscape are essential. We’ll discuss transformative visions for rural research, advocating for national-level funding and coordination, policy relevance through an asset-based lens, and cross-stakeholder collaboration. 
 

Interviewer

Sarah Rosen Wartell, President, Urban Institute

Guest

Luke Schaefer, Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and coauthor of the new book, The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America.

Transcript

Sarah Rosen Wartell, cohost:
Welcome to Evidence in Action, a podcast from the Urban Institute. I’m your cohost, Sarah Rosen Wartell. I have the honor of being Urban’s president.

Kimberlyn Leary, cohost:
And I’m your cohost, Kimberlyn Leary, executive vice president of the Urban Institute.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
In this podcast, Kim and I are going to explore the role of evidence: what it is, who makes it, who can use it, who should be using it, and how it can help us to shape policy and achieve better social, economic, and environmental outcomes.

Kimberlyn Leary:
And on every episode, we’ll be joined by a brilliant guest ranging from federal policymakers, local leaders, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and those who meet community needs.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
We’ll be asking them how they use facts, data, and evidence to improve lives and strengthen communities, and also about the limits of these tools in today’s complicated world.

On today’s show, I’m sitting down with Luke Shaefer, Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Luke also directs Poverty Solutions, an initiative that partners with communities to find new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. Luke is one of the nation’s leading scholars of poverty and social welfare policy, and he studies the deepest poverty in America and the mechanisms through which it persists. Alongside with coauthors, Kathy Edin and Timothy Nelson, Luke recently published a new book entitled The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America. This book explores some of the poorest places in the country—rural communities in Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts in South Texas—to examine the forces shaping people’s health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility and to develop a multidimensional Index of Deep Disadvantage. Thank you so much for joining us here today, Luke. It’s great to be with you.

Luke Shaefer, guest:
It’s really a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
So I’m going to ask you to tell us a little bit about where you’re from, and what did you want to be when you grew up?

Luke Shaefer:
I’m from the Ann Arbor area, which is where I live now. Just happened to be that this is where I got a job and came back. Actually, my family owned a hardware store in Ypsilanti, which is right next door, for about 100 years, and they closed it down in the 1970s as they saw the big-box stores coming in and how much harder it was going to be to be competitive. After that, my dad had a career crisis when I was in seventh grade, and we went from being in the lower rungs of the middle class to, I’m quite certain we would have been below the poverty line for a number of years, and I went without health insurance.

But I could see even then that when we couldn’t pay the rent or quite put food on the table, we mostly went to grandma and grandpa because we were in a family network where there was more means. And so what I know now is that the difference between me and many others is this compounded disadvantage of social networks and income and then wealth. At the time, I didn’t totally understand that, but what I did understand was I didn’t look like a lot of the people I went to school with in terms of how much money my family had. But I didn’t really feel poor necessarily either. And so, I decided fairly early on that I wanted to dedicate my life to understanding poverty in the United States and trying to do something about it.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
Wow, that’s a really great story to hear of the personal journey leading to the professional one. Before we get to your most recent book, I want to ask you about an earlier work you also did with one of the same coauthors, Kathy Edin, called $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. It’s widely regarded as one of the most influential books on poverty and its solutions that I certainly know of. And it has absolutely changed the way I think about how we can best support and empower the poor. Can you tell us a little bit about that book and how you think it has influenced, if at all, policymaking in this country?

Luke Shaefer:
So actually as I started my PhD and decided to become a scholar, I always wanted to be an applied scholar that would be connected to policymakers and community groups that were doing work on poverty. But I did find that data nerd side of me where, still to this day, nothing makes me feel warmer than a beautiful table or a chart, and it just fills me with this joy. And so a lot of my work was characterized by that. But just as you mentioned, Sarah, I think I did a lot of important work during that period, but I also lost that proximity a bit. And I think I did meaningful work, but I also just lost track of some things or couldn’t know the things that I was missing. And so, this one wonderful semester, I got to know Kathy Edin, she was at the Kennedy school, and she invited me up to spend the semester working and talking about projects.

And as you well know, she’s an ethnographer and a qualitative researcher, has done these incredibly influential studies about family formation as well as making ends meet, which really helped us understand how families in the pre–welfare reform era packaged together work in government assistance. She told me that she was seeing something she’d never seen before, she’d seen families that weren’t just poor by American standards, but were really, really poor, and poor in a particular way. So they would often have access to food assistance through SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], which is an incredibly important benefit. Sometimes they might have a housing subsidy, although that’s really quite rare. In Chicago, where we were working at the time, and the wait list was 85,000 families long and it was closed, so you couldn’t be 85,001 even if you wanted to. But what they absolutely didn’t have was access to cash income, so no money coming in the door.

And this was really a change, in her view, as someone who had done a huge amount of qualitative work with hundreds of families in the early ‘90s, where there really was a cash floor. And so in some ways, the safety net had gotten better with the expansion of the EITC [earned income tax credit], has been incredibly successful, but for families that fell on hard time, there was the sense that just the floor had disappeared and that safety net really had disappeared. And what are families to do when they don’t have the money to buy toiletries or pay the rent or pay the utility bills? So we used a bunch of data to find that actually there’d been this huge increase in the number of families reporting cash incomes below $2 per person per day. And that was sometimes for a month, sometimes for a calendar quarter, some of the data suggests it could be as long as a year, just more than a doubling of families in these circumstances across all sorts of different datasets.

And so we really set out to marry the quantitative research with this qualitative inquiry that started the question and then try to understand what their families were like. And so, we got to know families in Chicago and in Cleveland, in Appalachia, and then down in the Mississippi Delta. And that was really the first time I got to know really deep rural poverty in the South, which is where the new book really picks up afterwards. But after having done what we call an iterative mixed-methods investigation like this where we’re really trying to let big data be in conversation with the qualitative stories, it was just so much more enriching in terms of understanding what is actually going on. And I’ll give just one example from $2 a Day, so a lot of our work was around trying to figure out, what do families do to survive?

What do you do when you don’t have enough cash? And I think one of the best pieces of evidence that cash matters in 21^st-century America is the lengths of which families would spend time trying to access just a little bit. And so, I saw this crease on the inside of the elbow of one of our moms, a little divot, and I immediately thought, “Oh, that looks like a drug track line. She seems clean now, but maybe substance abuse was a part of the puzzle.” But as we started to ask questions about, how do you survive, what do you do to get money? It became clear that little divot, that little scar was actually from selling her blood plasma so often. So she and many other Americans sell their blood plasma often for $30, maybe $50 is about the range at one of the hundreds of plasma centers all across the United States that now we’ve been able to geocode and find are really surgically placed in low-income communities and in communities of color.

Again, we took this qualitative insight and we went back to the data and very quickly, actually, we were able to find out that the number of plasma sales in the United States as just about quintupled since the early 2000s to today; over 50 million plasma units sold in the United States. And the United States accounts for about 70 percent of the worldwide supply. These numbers are very rough, but that’s what it looks like, and only 40 percent of the demand. So we actually send the blood plasma mostly of poor Americans all over the world, in an incredibly profitable industry. So to me, the biggest insight here was this was something I knew nothing about before I took the time to go out and ask questions. And here’s this huge global phenomenon that’s actually really driven by the blood of poor Americans, in a literal sense.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
Well, I love that story because it’s also a story of the partnership between the data nerd and the ethnographer and what the two can do together. There’s this huge debate in our literature between those who think that qualitative methods can’t be rigorous, and yet you guys have a unique way of approaching work in which you start with data, go to the lived experience, which is a form of evidence, and then go back and test your learning against the evidence and what you are seeing in the data. And that iteration, I think in the partnership between the two, actually shows that one without the other loses something. So it’s been very exciting. It’s one of the biggest takeaways for me from reading your body of work.

Luke Shaefer:
Yeah. In qualitative work, you all are always wondering, did you just get a case that is unusual? Does this really speak for a broader set of evidence? But in the quantitative work, we’re basically boxed in by our own knowledge, and especially in a nation where we have such segregation, you can’t really know what you’re studying. You’re fumbling around in the dark, in a way, and so bringing the two in the conversation just I really think, as you said, gives you a much richer picture.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
I want to talk a little bit about the new book, which is called Injustice of Place. We’ve spent the last decade coming to understand just how powerfully where you live shapes the opportunities that you have in our country. And I think one of the starting points of that book was this Index of Deep Disadvantage that you developed that told you a little bit about the places where deep and persistent poverty exists in this country, urban and rural. So do you want to talk a little bit about the insights from the index and where it led you to?

Luke Shaefer:
Sure. We were going along after $2 a Day, we actually got a call from a program officer at Robert Wood Johnson approaching us about doing a sequel about communities. So what would it be like to look at this at the community level? And more and more research was coming out really stressing that people’s life chances are bounded by where they live. But a lot of the work in sociology that we were drawing from really looked at neighborhoods inside large cities. It’s true that in some counties and cities in the United States, the American dream—that if you grow up poor, you can rise to the middle class—is alive and well. And in other communities, if you grow up low income, you’re likely to be low income as an adult. So we were really taken by the idea of looking at the community level, but as we looked at the body of existing research, we also didn’t want to just pick one indicator, just only focus on income poverty.

So we took income poverty data from the American Community Survey, we took health data from CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] through the county health rankings on life expectancy and low infant birth weight. So we think of that as your health right at the start, and then the Chetty-Hendren mobility data. So these different factors and these three key domains of income, health, and mobility that we think have really high salience to Americans, and we loaded in every county in the United States and every city. So we think that’s the first time we’ve had an apples-to-apples comparison of the 500 largest cities in every county, and then rank them on a continuum of disadvantage that was built from a principal component analysis that takes into account all of these factors and then ranks them every county in every city.

And again, we were a bit humbled, as we often are, as we’re trying to understand what’s going on, to find that if we go down and look at the 100 most disadvantaged places, they are really predominantly rural, so I think there’s only 9 cities in the first 100 most disadvantaged places. So as scholars who had spent most of our careers studying northern cities, and I think if you look at the whole literature that we have on poverty, a lot of people often immediately think of urban poverty. To see that these clusters of deep, deep disadvantage in the Cotton Belt through the South, into the Tobacco Belt, Appalachia, Eastern Kentucky and that cluster of states, and then down in South Texas really was the first insight where we thought, “Oh, we have not been going to the right places if we want to be really studying the deepest disadvantage.”

And from there, from a quantitative analysis piece, we kept on having our presumptions be shattered. So we and other people have said, “Well, maybe the issue is inequality that a place like LA has both poverty but also wealth, and so it doesn’t look as bad.” Actually, a lot of these communities in the Cotton Belt and Appalachia are also highly unequal. Their Gini coefficients look just as bad, they have incredible housing burden challenges. That’s another thing we think is, “Oh, well, at least housing is cheaper.” And violence is a big issue too, something that I wasn’t aware of. So really when you look across these indicators, these places are deeply disadvantaged, and they don’t have the infrastructure, community supports that a lot of northern cities have either.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
I’m lucky to lead the Urban Institute, which was envisioned as a place that was to give attention to build an evidence base for solving poverty described as the problem of our cities. But, in fact, it was really about deep, persistent poverty and structural racism that kept people locked in poverty over generations. And those same challenges exist in every kind of landscape. So we like to think, today, that we focus on people in place, and you did too in this, and maybe reminded ourselves to look broader. But I think you found that whether you’re in an urban or a rural area, there are systems and structures that reinforce poverty, and those systems may be different if you’re trying to target a solution to a poor rural community. Or maybe they’re similar. So I’m curious, what did you find, what were some of the things that drove the deep and persistent poverty in some of these rural places that you were looking at for the first time?

Luke Shaefer:
So we started with the index and that gave us this ranking, and then we wanted to come back to this iterative mixed-methods approach. And so we saw these clusters and Appalachia and the Cotton Belt and the Tobacco Belt, and then South Texas, so we used all of that to pick some field sites. So we found ourselves in Clay County, Kentucky, in Eastern Kentucky, in Leflore County in Mississippi, Marion County in South Carolina. We had a wonderful group of student research collaborators, many of whom moved to these places for periods of time and did sets of interviews with low-income families, with community leaders, and did a lot of participant observation. And once again, I think even more so than $2 a Day, this book was a book of surprises for me.

So just as you say, we were trying to really look at what were the mechanisms by which deep disadvantage persists over a long period of time because we can look at maps, we could look at a map of these indicators from 50 years ago. We can even look at a map of something like enslavement from 1860 and just see huge parallels between our map of the deep disadvantage and these historical maps. So it really suggests this persistence over time that’s important. But the violence that we saw in these places is community violence, but we really have to put this also into a historical context, that these have all been places that have had violence and state-sponsored violence and often have ignored violence within poor communities for purposeful reason in the past.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
I wanted to ask you about areas of hope. You spent a lot of time looking at places with the deepest of disadvantage anywhere in this country. What are some of the things that you saw that felt promising, where you saw changes?

Luke Shaefer:
In every place that we got to know, there were incredible community leaders who were really trying to do right by their communities. We had a set of pastors in Clay County, Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic was raging, helped to organize thousands and thousands of people into a march against drugs. And it was also a march against government corruption that really changed the trajectory of that place. So one of the structural challenges, as folks who want to bring resources to their communities or change these long-term historical movement, it’s more difficult to draw down resources from the federal government. One of the best indicators of the number of federal grant dollars coming into a place is the number of grant writers in that community after you account for poverty rate.

And so there are these places that all of the odds are stacked against them, yet there are people who are doing this incredible work and making a real and meaningful difference. In the Cotton Belt, we saw, I think, both among community leaders who tended to be white in the community that we were in, as well as community members, just this real interest in moving past the segregation of the past. So just a huge amount of reflection of saying, “I think we would’ve all been better off if Black residents and white residents hadn’t grown up in separate schools,” and especially among white residents wishing that their parents hadn’t done that, hadn’t passed that on to them.

So in the community we were in in the Cotton Belt, this Cotton Boll every year. Each one of these places prided itself in being the nation’s capital in something. So we’ve got the cotton capital of the world in Mississippi. We’ve got the spinach capital of the world in South Texas, and the Cotton Boll is this annual huge gala event, and it was just starting to be integrated for the first time when we were there. So I do think that there is a lot of understanding that the ways of the past don’t work, that we should build on actually the rich cultural legacy of these places, but also chart a different path forward.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
One of the takeaways from $2 a Day that goes to this idea of administrative policy and how you approach program implementation was the importance of dignity. This idea that when you give an individual a coupon book where they pay for their food with a different currency than everybody else at the checkout station uses, it has a very stigmatizing effect. But when we went to electronic benefit debit cards to allow people who are on what were then food stamps, now SNAP benefits, that they’re paying the same way everyone else pays, and that may increase uptake, but it also just has the effect of helping people to themselves believe and how we all see each other. Does this book lead you to similar kinds of notions about the dignity that exists in these communities and how we can inadvertently make it worse or perhaps maybe we can support the human dignity of all?

Luke Shaefer:
I’ve really come to believe that how we deliver help matters to a huge degree, and that we often send unintended signals by the way that we do it. The benefits application in my home state of Michigan had become one of the longest in the entire country. And so just a couple of examples, there was a question that you had to answer about the date of the conception of your child.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
I don’t know.

Luke Shaefer:
Exactly, right. And then in the fine print down at the bottom, it would say, “If you’re defrauding the government, you could face up to $250 fine and 20 years in prison.” And I don’t think anyone’s ever been prosecuted like that, but just think of the messages that we’re sending when these are the types of things that we’re asking people to fill out. And so that was some of the logic that helped inform the expanded child tax credit. In Kathy’s work, she shows how the EITC has been hugely successful in this front, right? So I really encourage people to think about: What are the intended and unintended signals we’re sending?

I think with communities of deep disadvantage, some of the lessons are, one thing I’ll say is, I think most residents in these places, at least the ones that we talked to, have a very low opinion of what government can actually accomplish. They have a very low opinion of what philanthropy can do. And so I think some of the ways that we try to enhance dignity is by starting by asking, and really having an approach of not coming in once again and saying, “You don’t have any faith in me that I’m going to be able to help you, but boy, have I got the solution for you, look at all these peer-reviewed journals. This is a way to do it.” So I hope that this book tries to help show a different approach, which is to really start with listening and then showing value.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
That’s very inspiring to think about. I want to ask you a question that we ask every one of the guests on this podcast. Our key theme is trying to explore the ways in which evidence and research can actually lead to change on the ground for people. Do you have a favorite example of where a piece of high-quality evidence, whether derived quantitatively or qualitatively or both, has informed choice that ultimately has the result of making the lives of people better? Can you give me an example of evidence in action?

Luke Shaefer:
Of course, my all-time favorite answer is the expanded child tax credit. So this was a policy that, it’s been tried in country after country all over the world, and every time it gets implemented, you see child poverty plummet. You see where we have the data, food-hardship plummets. You see kids and families do better. We saw just this huge reduction of child poverty, we saw this big reduction in food hardship. We saw the families at the highest level saying they could afford a $400 crisis expense if they had to, credit scores, evictions stayed at super low levels, way lower than before for that period, and it was incredibly successful. It was not extended, I happen to think it wasn’t in place long enough, but after it went away, we started to see all of that stuff start to get worse again.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
Well, I always think of that moment as being a perfect example of the need to have a long-time horizon for evidence-based work. The teachable moment, the moment when a body of work like that can then move its way into policy, you don’t always know when it’s going to come. None of us predicted a pandemic, and we wish there had been a chance to prove the point some other way. But it is absolutely the case that that work had laid the groundwork that when someone needed to act in a crisis, they could turn to that and act from it.

And we do know that when children don’t grow up in poverty, their long-term life outcomes are so much better. Luke, thank you, first and foremost, for the work that you do, for being so committed to understanding and teaching all of us what it is like for those who live in the deep and most persistent forms of poverty that sometimes some of us want to turn away from. But you bring that forward in a just really compelling way. And thank you for spending some time with me today and sharing some of your insights. We’re really, really grateful.

Luke Shaefer:
Such a pleasure. And I just have so much admiration and use work from the Urban Institute every single day.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
And to all, please join us next time on Evidence in Action as we have conversations about important ways to drive change with wonderful guests like Luke. If you’d like to learn more about us, go to the website at urban.org, and you can follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This has been Evidence in Action, created by the Urban Institute and Pod People. I’m your cohost, Sarah Rosen Wartell. Thank you.