Urban Antipoverty Programs

URBAN ANTIPOVERTY programs come in many different forms. By definition, exclusive of agriculturally based poverty alleviation programs, urban antipoverty policies attempt to address the phenomenon of urban poor—a rapidly growing category in the majority of countries across the world.

The main approaches used by governments against poverty can be classified as 1) direct aid to human capital, 2) economic development and urban regeneration, and 3) mass incarceration.

Direct aid to human capital, or cash and/or service transfers (such as job training) given directly to urban poor to lift them above a poverty line, is an approach utilized in western Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world, but is criticized by social conservatives as paternalistic and failing to distinguish between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”

Economic development and urban regeneration programs are by far the most popular form of urban antipoverty program across the world. From World Bank-sponsored urban regeneration in India to real estate development proposals in downtown Brooklyn, New York, policymakers believe that through urban redevelopment efforts that bring middle and upper classes back into the city, the economic success will trickle down to the benefit of original poor inhabitants. In reality, such regeneration programs involve a displacement of working-class residents from urban centers. Finally, the penalization of poverty is a phenomenon found increasingly in, but not limited to, the United States.

To fully understand the shift away from direct aid programs toward urban regeneration, it is useful to examine the history of United States federal urban poverty programs since the 1960s. Gary A. Dymski highlights a number of early antipoverty programs based on economic development. One example is the 1966 CAAP (Community Action Against Poverty) Program, which provided organized communities the opportunity to apply for community health centers and provided funds to start Community Development Corporations (CDCs), which in turn provide a host of social programs. At the same time, the federal government waged war on inner cities through urban renewal where governmentally appointed redevelopment authorities obtained rights of eminent domain over “blighted,” largely minority neighborhoods.

This last point is key to understanding the relationship between renewal and social tranquility, since, as noted by John Mollenkopf in Marxism and the Metropolis, “virtually all of the riot areas (of the late 1960s) were sites of major renewal efforts; quite frequently struggles over the nature of renewal lurked behind the riots as an implicit issue.” In 1969, the Richard Nixon administration replaced many of the existing urban antipoverty programs with the Model Cities Program (MCP). In 1974, the Nixon administration created the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which pooled various programs aimed at reducing poverty and redeveloping urban areas.

CDBG signaled the last concerted effort to address urban poverty at a federal level. In the following decades, there was a redefinition of poverty itself. There was a concerted move from seeing poverty as a macroeconomic, structural, and demand-side problem to an individual problem. With Bill Clinton's 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (welfare reform), urban antipoverty programs reflected stereotypes that attributed poverty to personal failings rather than socioeconomic structures and systems. As J. Peck eloquently describes, “workfirst” antipoverty programs “presume a ‘deficient model’ of the unemployed: that one of the reasons they are out of work is that they do not know (or have somehow forgotten) how to work.”

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