Inequities impacting Chicago's Black community likely to get uglier with 'Big Beautiful Bill'

It’ll be months before many provisions of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" will take effect, but the impact for some parts of Black Chicago can be seen a mile away.

It’s going to be bad, real bad.

It might be premature to make firm predictions on how the wide-ranging bill will impact individuals and their households. However, considering its historic changes to safety net programs like Medicaid and food stamps, many are predicting the Trump Administration’s signature legislation will have a dramatic effect on low-income Americans. Some say work requirements and other changes could result in households receiving fewer benefits or losing them altogether.

But even with the uncertainty, it’s safe to say that communities that have endured economic struggles for decades will likely see those struggles continue. And there are few places that rival parts of Black Chicago in terms of consistent disinvestment, segregation and other factors that contribute to long-term economic stagnation.

That fact is clearly seen in a 2023 report from the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan economic think tank based in Washington, D.C. The report highlights the group’s measurement of "persistent poverty" in Census tracts and counties across the country. The group defines persistent-poverty communities as those where poverty rates have exceeded 20% for at least three decades. The report documents poverty rates from 1990 to 2019.

It didn’t take long for Black Chicago to get a shout-out. Here’s the opening paragraph of the report’s preface: "In policy debates in the United States, poverty is often thought of as an individual or family issue: a condition of being low income, and oftentimes, dependent on public support to make ends meet. But poverty is also a spatial phenomenon. Numerous communities across the country have been poor for generations: think parts of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the southern border, or Chicago’s South Side."

Indeed, according to my analysis of the report’s data, about 175 of the nearly 235 persistent-poverty Census tracts in Chicago were majority-Black areas on the city’s South and West sides. They included all of the census tracts in East Garfield Park, Englewood, Riverdale, Washington Park and West Garfield Park. They also included most of the Census tracts in Austin, Grand Boulevard, North Lawndale, South Shore, West Englewood and Woodlawn.

During a webinar this month, sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau, Kenan Fikri, one of the report’s authors, explained that communities are much more likely than individuals to remain entrenched in poverty for decades. He said just 2.2% of individuals experience poverty for as long as three decades. Meanwhile, roughly 13.5% of neighborhoods experience such persistent poverty.

But the percentages are staggeringly higher for Native American and Black neighborhoods. Nationwide, more than 85% of majority-Native American census tracts and more than 50% of majority-Black census tracts experienced persistent poverty, according to my analysis of the Economic Innovation Group’s data. For majority-Latino census tracts, the figure was 34%. It was more than 5.5% for majority-white census tracts and just 4.7% for areas where Asians and Other Pacific Islanders were the majority racial or ethnic group.

Fikri explained persistent-poverty areas can be effectively disconnected from the broader economy — even a thriving one — due to a variety of economic and social factors. He displayed a graphic illustrating commuting patterns to Chicago’s central business district from the north and south showing how they largely bypassed the persistent-poverty areas on the city’s South and West sides. The result is those areas aren’t participating in the predominant flows of the city’s economic life, he concluded.

He also spoke of the social isolation of individuals in persistent-poverty communities due to spatial segregation and the lack of exposure to individuals in other social networks. He said research shows such disconnection limits access to social capital that helps foster upward mobility.

In addition to poverty rates, the group’s data included measurements of employment stability, education and broadband access — all of which were more strongly correlated with poverty in majority-Black areas than they were in majority-Latino or majority-white areas. It suggests that high rates of employment, college education and internet connectivity could help lift Black communities out of persistent poverty.

The report’s data also revealed several parts of the country where most Black spaces are not enduring persistent poverty. One of them is Prince George’s County in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. Just a fraction of the more than 150 majority-Black Census tracts there are experiencing persistent poverty.

Addressing poverty has never been easy. There are no quick fixes. But the first step to finding solutions might be realizing that the problems of persistent poverty are much more complex than people simply not wanting to work.

Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.