Low income areas lack resources

Kathryn Neckerman doesn’t feel that people pay enough attention to the famous quote “Time is… Kathryn Neckerman doesn’t feel that people pay enough attention to the famous quote “Time is money.”

Neckerman, a sociologist and the associate director of Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy, spoke yesterday about how lower-income families are negatively affected by their lack of available resources.

This was the third lecture in a series of four that Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems hosts every semester. Since its formation in 2002, the center has hosted lectures for three years with funding from two law firms, Reed Smith LLC and Buchanan Ingersoll and Rooney PC.

More than 40 people gathered in the conference center of Pitt’s School of Social Work at noon yesterday to hear Neckerman address the issue of city dwellers’ unequal access to basic consumer services such as grocery stores and banks.

At the beginning of her lecture, she cited a newspaper article in The New York Times that described a woman who spent the majority of the day traveling to the bank. The woman, who lives in Soundview, N.Y., has to take two buses to reach her destination, but many people in her neighborhood can’t make the trip and resort to the use of check-cashing stores or ATMs.

Neckerman then said that studies have proven that this method can cost lower income families approximately $2,000 a year.

She also cited a woman in New York who made two trips every week to the grocery store because she couldn’t carry all her food in one load. Meanwhile, the woman had to pay someone to watch her children while she was gone.

“Low income families pay in time,” Neckerman said.

The time that it takes to travel to the grocery store or the bank could be facilitated either with the use of a car or by living closer to basic services, she said.

But traveling takes time, and if people with lower incomes are too busy taking two buses to work or to run errands, they probably don’t have time to better their situation by going back to school, getting a second job or exercising to improve their health.

“Even though we say time is money, we don’t really take that to heart,” Neckerman said.

Despite the difficulties of living in an economically challenged area, some researchers have found counter-intuitive evidence that finds many lower income neighborhoods are not disadvantaged with consumer services.

After comparing the special distribution between stores like banks, barber shops and grocery stores, the amount of services offered per kilometer is higher in poorer neighborhoods as opposed to middle and upper class neighborhoods.

But many factors can contribute to this finding, Neckerman said. People with higher incomes often have cars, which increases their access to these types of businesses.

In addition, researchers have often found evidence that black neighborhoods have fewer resources than Latino and other immigrant neighborhoods. This statistic could stem from the discrimination that many entrepreneurs may have when deciding where to open a business.

This racial discrimination includes having more difficulty applying for loans or a business shying away because it assumes that a black population would not buy its products.

One answer to this problem may be the location in which some minorities live. While many white people generally live on the periphery of the cities, some blacks and other minorities live closer to the city’s center – generally its oldest part.

In cities such as Chicago and New York City, the center was built at a time when cars had either not been invented or were not in widespread use. The planning usually reflects narrower roads and a grid that is not easily designed for parking lots.

“It’s not because of who they are,” Neckerman said. “It’s because of where they live.”