Almost every one of the counties which form the core of metro Atlanta — including Cobb, Fulton and Gwinnett — is bad for a lower- or middle-income child's economic mobility, bringing down their prospective earnings by thousands by age 26, according to an April 2015 study analyzed in the New York Times.
The rest of the metro area isn't much better. But, according to this study, not all bad areas are equally bad.
And there are a few counties in the state, such as Fayette, Oconee and Paulding, where a child's future economic prosperity is actually improved, and are more likely to go to college and less likely to be single parents.
The Times writes: "Location matters — enormously. If you’re poor and live in the Atlanta area, it’s better to be in Fayette County than in Fulton County or Morgan County. Not only that, the younger you are when you move to Fayette, the better you will do on average. ...
"Every year a poor child spends in Fayette County adds about $140 to his or her annual household income at age 26, compared with a childhood spent in the average American county."
These revelations are part of the work of Harvard economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren who, in the study analyzed by the Times, upend years-long assumptions about the apparent intractability of income mobility.
A previous Congressional anti-poverty experiment, Moving to Opportunity, found that randomly awarding poor families with a move to a better neighborhood did not, in later years, seem to make the parents earn more than otherwise similar adults or to make their children do better in school, according to the Times.
But with the new study, "researchers are no longer confined to talking about which counties merely correlate well with income mobility; new data suggests some places actually cause it."
And the reverse: Some counties appear to act as economic barriers. This category includes Spalding County, according to the study, where a child from a low-income family would make $4,450 less (or 17 percent) in average income by age 26.
Such "barrier counties" are concentrated nationally in parts of the deep South: the Carolinas, Georgia and Mississippi.
State-wide, such counties are clustered in central, east and southwest Georgia: Burke, Early and Hancock counties, and others.
The picture improves some for high-income children in Georgia — but it looks completely different for extremely wealthy children, according to the study.
For them, several metro counties are a boon, including Fulton. In Gwinnett County, in particular, a child of the "1 percent" will make $4,310 more (or 9 percent) than the average income by age 26.
(Bizarrely, "1 percent" children growing up in Cherokee County will make $4,360 less, or 9 percent, than the average income by age 26.)
All of this data suggests a new approach to housing policies, which have not historically privileged low-income parents with young children, who according to this study can benefit the most from a move.
At the same time, experts told the Times, the focus must remain on reviving impoverished neighborhoods and counties.
"We can't walk away from them," said Julián Castro, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
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