The thin, baby-faced man stood smiled nervously last week as a roomful of civic-minded Atlantans settled into their seats in the meeting hall of St. Lukes’s Episcopal Church downtown. Nathaniel Hendren, an assistant professor of economics who has spent the last decade matriculating or teaching in the august halls of The University of Chicago, M.I.T. and now Harvard, had the temerity to fly to South and face some of the residents his research dissed.
Last summer, Hendren was part of a team that released a study that said Atlanta was where Horatio Algiers came to die. And now there was an opportunity to conduct a post-mortem and discuss quintiles and display charts at the Atlanta Regional Housing Forum, an ongoing meeting of non-profit, business, governmental and grassroots types who talk about affordable housing.
The study by Harvard and University of California economists looked at millions of anonymous IRS records over the years, tracked the lifespan of babies born around 1980 and determined how they were doing financially now. The results put Atlanta dead last among America’s 50 biggest cities, ranking it as the worst place for children from households in the bottom fifth of income levels to ascend into the top fifth as adults. It said a poor kid from the Atlanta area had a 4 percent chance of doing so, ranking our city three slots below Detroit (5 percent), the bankrupt, rusted apocalyptic backdrop for a Mad Max movie.
Worse, the New York Times used the study as front-page fodder to cast Atlanta as a place where the working poor were sentenced to a lifetime of dreary jobs and interminable bus commutes. Times columnist, Paul Krugman, the renowned darling of the left, gleefully dubbed Atlanta the “Sultan of Sprawl,” leading to further piling on in the press and blogosphere.
The study and ensuing articles dented the city's narrative that Atlanta is a wonderful place to do business and drew harrumphs from boosters of The International City Too Busy to Hate.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who, rumor has it, enjoys air-conditioned rapid transit rides and still believes a poor boy can make it big here, set forth with a spirited public rebuttal. He contended that 70 percent of Atlanta kids born in the lowest quintile moved up the ladder (which he said was comparable to other cities). He added that metro Atlanta was among the nation’s top five fastest growing areas and that The Times used Atlanta as a punching bag for the entire Southeast.
The study, Hendren noted, is sort of like a Rorschach test, “People read into it what they want to see. It confirms their pre-conceived notions.”
Those pushing public transit options liked hearing that the lower the travel time to get to work, the higher the rates of upward mobility.
Social conservatives could embrace the fact that the more single-parent families, the less chance of upward mobility.
And those who bring up racial issues could dig into figures saying the higher the percentage of African Americans, the lower the percentage of upward mobility (although, Hendren pointed out, he mobility of lower income whites is less successful in areas with high black population.)
But the most damning fact of the study was that it implied there is a geography of opportunity. For instance, if a child from a low-mobility area moved to Seattle (which led the big cities with an 11.5 percent bottom-to-top ascension) then that child would do was well as kids born there. But if the child moved there as a teen, he’d do less well.
“Everything points to an ether that happens in the local atmosphere,” Hendren told the crowd, later adding, “To a large extent, you actively pick up the mobility characteristics of the place. Why? I don’t know. We’re posing many more questions than answers.”
Speaking to the crowd at St. Luke’s wasn’t exactly like Hendren was facing a civic firing squad. In fact, many there don’t mind pointing out the city’s warts.
The crowd was quick to venture answers: Plantation politics, poor schools, racial and economic segregation, disconnected transit, feuding political fiefdoms.
Chuck Meadows, a Metro of Atlanta Chamber vice president, said the region is still a great place to do business but broke from the usual chamber spin to add that the area lacks a sense of community. He pointed out that Cobb County residents last year overwhelmingly shot down approval of a sales tax initiative aimed at easing transportation woes. But, he added, Cobb’s leaders gave a “speedy approval” to public funding to bring the Braves from Atlanta to land outside of I-285.
“It’s a disturbing trend to swallow up our region: (There’s a feeling that) ‘I’ll support it when it’s near me but I don’t see myself as a citizen of our region,’” Meadows said of the growing parochial mood.
Deborah Scott, executive director of Georgia Stand-up, a think tank that advocates affordable housing and "livable communities," said metro leaders won't delve into major problems head-on. "Atlanta is very polite. We don't like to talk about race, class and politics in the same sentence," Scott said. "There is a disdain for poor people, but we don't want to say it."
The event’s emcee, Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta Community Food Bank and Georgia Trend magazine’s 2012 Georgian of the Year, said there is a great disconnect in local conversations about vital matters.
“Do facts matter anymore? Everyone seems to be working with their own set of facts these days,” said Bolling.
Bolling said the city's robust boosterism can be a double-edged sword. "There's a good in that there's a foundation to build on success. But there's also a blind eye that says, 'Your study's wrong.'"
But, as Bolling introduced the speaker, he told the crowd, “The discussion is timely; it’s important and it’s critical.”
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