The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) hosted a virtual briefing on September 19 to highlight findings from a recent report on reducing intergenerational poverty and the methods by which housing policies can significantly mitigate the effects of long-term poverty cycles. The report, Reducing Intergenerational Poverty, is a congressionally mandated, non-partisan, evidence-based analysis that reveals key drivers of long-term intergenerational poverty, evaluates racial disparities, identifies evidence-based policy solutions, and discusses gaps in existing data. Dr. Mary E. Patillo, a member of NASEM’s Committee on Policies and Programs to Reduce Intergenerational Poverty and Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies Chair at Northwestern University, provided an overview of the data used in the report and reviewed its findings regarding housing.
Intergenerational poverty occurs when children who grow up in families with low incomes experience low-income status in adulthood. Analysis of intergenerational poverty requires long-term data collection, for which researchers gather data on children and as they move into adulthood. The data used in the report found that approximately a third of children who grew up in families with low incomes had low incomes in adulthood – twice the share found among those who did not group up poor. Households in the bottom 20% of the income distribution according to IRS tax records were considered low income.
During the webinar, Dr. Patillo emphasized that housing is foundational to many components of a child’s environment affecting their development: schools, safety, businesses, parks, transportation, health care, childcare, and air quality. She also discussed how the housing unit itself is relevant to intergenerational poverty since income affects housing crowding, housing stability, and housing affordability. She went on to highlight racial disparities in household mobility, concentration of poverty, housing quality, and housing cost burden. Among other disparities, the report finds that Black and Native American children are more than seven times as likely, and Latino children more than four times as likely, as white children to live in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 30% or more.
Dr. Patillo also reviewed the standards used for the report’s policy recommendations: the direct evidence standard (evidence of long-term outcomes into adulthood) and the strong evidence standard (causal evidence that a policy improves a correlate of adult poverty, e.g. earnings, health, or education completion). Based on these standards, the report finds promising evidence of the benefits of the “Family Stability and Opportunity Vouchers Act” (FSOVA), which would expand the Housing Choice Voucher program to an additional 250,000 families with children under the age of six and couple vouchers with customized counseling services to enable families to access well-resourced neighborhoods of their choice.
The FSOVA is a top policy priority for the Opportunity Starts at Home (OSAH) campaign, and its enactment would represent a major step forward in tackling the nation’s housing crisis.
Read the report highlights and the NASEM issue brief on housing.