Poverty and Reapportionment

I started writing this back in April but ran out of steam. Now that Mayor Jones’ redistricting committee has completed its reports and redistricting proposals, it is time for me to fully address this issue.

Written in April

The mayor of our fair city has appointed a committee to provide input into the once-in-ten-years reapportionment process that Richmond is currently engaged in. The mayor’s committee is in addition to the committee that the City Council has appointed to aid it in redistricting. According to an article in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, Mayor Dwight Jones wants the city to consider residents living in poverty as well as the increased number of Hispanics and other minorities before it redraws voter district boundaries this year. Jones says redistricting must involve 2 groups.

The nine districts existing in the City of Richmond were created by Section 30, Article II of the Richmond City Code. They were created under the authority of section 24.2-304.1.B of the Virginia Code, which provides:

“If the members [of the governing body] are elected from districts or wards . . . the districts or wards shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory and shall be so constituted as to give, as nearly as is practicable, representation in proportion to the population of the district or ward.”

With respect to reapportionment, the state law provides:

“In 1971 and every ten years thereafter, the governing body of each such locality shall reapportion the representation among the districts or wards, including, if the governing body deems it appropriate, increasing or diminishing the number of such districts or wards, in order to give, as nearly as is practicable, representation on the basis of population.”

So, in reapportioning the city’s nine districts, the City Council needs to come up with districts that are contiguous and compact and give the residents of the city representation base on population.

It would seem to this maven that the nine members of the City Council, assisted by their existing committee, would be able to carry out the mandates of the state law. Why do we need this new committee? Mayor Jones explained it in these words,

“We have basically looked at redistricting through a black-white lens, but this [2010] census requires us to broaden our view and look at it through a multicultural, multiracial lens. Seventeen-thousand five-hundred people will be left out of the discussion if we do it that way.”

Written today

The mayor’s committee has (apparently) finished its task. It submitted a report, a separate document of recommendations and specific reapportionment plans. (The report and recommendations were printed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and you can find them at report and at recommendations ). Surprisingly to this maven, it made no reapportionment recommendations concerning the Hispanic community, which I thought was the mayor’s real concern in appointing the committee. However, the committee made significant recommendations about reapportionment and the poor, including specific redistricting proposals. I will get to those shortly, but first. . .

Even someone who is a newcomer to Richmond like this maven (under Richmond standards I would have to live into my 100s to lose the designation “newcomer”) knows that Richmond has a poverty problem. Recent census data indicates that 22.1 % of Richmond’s population lives in poverty. (According to federal standards, the poverty threshold for a family of 4 is $21,954 per year in family income. For individuals, the threshold is $11,161 in annual income). This poverty population is concentrated densely in a few areas of the city because, in part, of decisions we have made about where to locate public housing projects and where to locate interstate highways. In its report the mayor’s committee reported the poverty populations of the city’s nine City Council districts, which I rearrange to list by poverty level:

6th District…….41%
5th District….…31%
7th District….…29%
8th District…….28%
2nd District……24%
9th District…….18%
3rd District…...14.5%
1st District..…...8%
4th District…....5%

These numbers represent the percentage of the residents of these districts who have annual incomes at or below the federal poverty levels.

In its report the committee discusses the interaction between poverty and politics in the city. Based on this discussion, it sets out two basic principals in its document accompanying the report:

First, the committee recommends that council districts should be “internally diverse and politically competitive,” so as to have meaningful elections that the voters will actually participate in.

I am certainly in favor of competitive elections. I think it is very bad for the health of the city (or of the Commonwealth) for any candidate to run with no, or only token, opposition. In our 2008 city elections, 3 candidates for the City Council and 3 candidates for the School Board ran with no opposition on the ballot. It would be nice to end this kind of election. But I do not see how this problem can be fixed by reapportionment. People live where they want or, in some cases, are required to live. Neighborhoods are established by the patterns of home purchase or apartment rental. You can’t create artificial communities by drawing district lines zigzagging across the city. Moreover, creating “internally diverse and politically competitive” districts by gerrymandering may violate the state law I quoted above that requires districts to be “contiguous and compact.”

Second, the committee argues that “poverty should be sufficiently disbursed across districts such that a majority of districts have poverty rates close to or exceeding the citywide average.”

The committee gives four rationales for this principal:

“First, distributing poverty across districts expresses the idea and the reality that poverty is a shared problem for the city as a whole, not just an issue affecting a few neighborhoods or areas of the city.”

This is a symbolic rationale. I think that anybody who lives in the City of Richmond and who gets news from the Times-Dispatch or our weekly newspapers or television or radio or the Internet knows that Richmond has a poverty problem. Unfortunately, if there is no visible poverty in their neighborhood, most residents are not going to consider poverty to be an issue that affects them. Gerrymandering poor people to distribute them across districts will have no real affect on people’s perceptions.

“Second, if poverty is indeed to be addressed as a major policy priority over the next decade, it is crucial that a strong majority of Council and School Board members have a direct stake in the issue.”

This argument is counter intuitive. Generally, when we want to increase the political clout of a minority group we try to concentrate them in a small number of districts. The committee recognizes this fact in the portion of its report and recommendations that deals with the city’s Hispanic population. This strategy is the basis of majority-minority districts—we create districts in which a minority group constitutes a majority of the residents to assure they can elect a candidate of their choice. If we applied the committee’s rationale, we would conclude that African Americans in the Commonwealth would be better served if we reapportioned the state so they are a small presence in all districts rather than a majority or near-majority in one or two. I fear that dispersing poor people by reapportionment will weaken rather than strengthen their political influence.

It also does not recognize the fact that numbers of people in a district does not necessarily translate into votes. If a “strong majority” of City Council or the School Board is going to have a “direct stake” in the poverty issue, the individual members need to know that failing to deal with this issue will cost them reelection. The unfortunate fact, which the committee recognizes in its report, is that poor people seem to turn out to vote at a fairly low rate. The committee looks at rates of registration and voter turnout rates in reaching this conclusion. Instead I look at the total number of people voting in our 2008 mayoral election in the city’s two districts with the least number of poor and compare them with the number voting in the four with the highest concentrations of poverty. I chose the mayoral election because the candidates and the issues were the same across the city. I chose to look at the actual number of people voting because that number deals both with registration percentage and turnout. What did this maven find?

District………………Poverty Rate……………..Votes Cast
4th…………………….…...5%..................................12,503
1st………………………..…8%..................................11,714
6th…………………………41%...................................6,392
5th…………………………31%...................................9,582
7th……………………..….29%...................................7,834
8th………………………..28%...................................6,702

Although the numbers do not show an exact correlation, it is clear that fewer people voted in the districts with the highest poverty rates as compared with those with the lowest rates. The question that the committee did not answer is whether a poverty population of 20% in a district is high enough to give the incumbent in that district a “direct stake” in the poverty issue.

“Third, having a majority of members who are invested in poverty increases the potential leverage of low-income residents and supportive organizations when they engage in advocacy; they can make their case to many elected officials, not a small number.”

This rationale is merely an extension of the previous one. And the same points I made above relate here. Further, these two arguments are based on the assumption that elected officials will only be “invested” in the issue of poverty if there are election consequences for them. I am not sure that this assumption is true for all elected officials.

“Fourth, distributing poverty widely is an equal public services issue, insofar as direct attention from council members and school board members to neighborhoods or blocks experiencing severe problems is an important public service.”

This rationale is based on the assumption that it is the job of a councilperson or a board member to obtain public services for their constituents. Both the City Council and the School Board are legislative bodies. The functions of a legislative body are to set public policy through the enactment of legislation—ordinances in the case of the City Council, policies in the case of the School Board—and to oversee the operations of the city’s administrative offices. Gaining public services is not part of the job. In fact, it creates inequality in delivery of city or school services depending on the influence of one’s elected officials. During the administration of Mayor Douglas Wilder, the administration made it clear that citizens must obtain city services by contacting the proper person in the administration not through their councilperson. I have no reason to assume that the policy is different under Mayor Dwight Jones.

Because I do not think the committee’s recommendations will be beneficial, and in fact may be counterproductive, I will not spend any time on evaluating its three specific reapportionment plans.

School Issues: The Children (Part A)

One of the girls I tutor, Squaisha, is making real progress in school (in part, I hope, because I’m her friend). Then, about two weeks ago, just a month before the SOLs, she was not in school. Her teacher told me that she was out because she hadn’t received her vaccinations. By the time she was properly vaccinated, Squaisha missed about eight days of school. SOLs are next week and I am worried about how well she will do. This is the same Squaisha who lives with her grandmother because both her parents “passed.” (I never had the nerve to ask the teacher how Squaisha lost both her parents.) Of course, if Squaisha does not pass her SOLs this year, she will become part of a statistic that shows that Richmond Public Schools does not do as good a job educating its students as do the suburban school systems. It makes this maven angry to think about it.

Let’s look at the statistics from the Richmond Public Schools website. In the school year 2005-06, the most recent year for which statistics are posted, 77% of the elementary school children and 75% of the middle school children in Richmond Public Schools receive federally subsidized meals. (Eligibility for the federal meal subsidy is generally considered an indication that a child comes from a low-income family). The percentage of students receiving subsidized meals in high school dropped to 47%, I assume because many high school students do not eat at school at all.

So, what’s the significance of so many of our children receiving subsidized meals? Last August, in an article in Style Weekly, Don Cowles of Initiatives of Change was quoted as saying that school systems with more than 50% of their students receiving subsidized meals “simply do not succeed.” Well, Richmond Public Schools has a percentage of children receiving subsidized meals considerably higher than 50% and as a system it certainly is succeeding. See Richmond Public Schools are Pretty Damn Good.

Yet, children like Squaisha are struggling. Why? In the April 2008 issue of Educational Leadership, published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Richard Rothstein says,

If you send two groups of students to equally high-quality schools, the group with greater socioeconomic disadvantage will necessarily have lower average achievement than the more fortunate group.
Why is this so? Because low-income children often have no health insurance and therefore no routine preventive medical and dental care, leading to more school absences as a result of illness. Children in low-income families are more prone to asthma, resulting in more sleeplessness, irritability, and lack of exercise. They experience lower birth weight as well as more lead poisoning and iron-deficiency anemia, each of which leads to diminished cognitive ability and more behavior problems. Their families frequently fall behind in rent and move, so children switch schools more often, losing continuity of instruction.
Poor children are, in general, not read to aloud as often or exposed to complex language and large vocabularies. Their parents have low-wage jobs and are more frequently laid off, causing family stress and more arbitrary discipline. The neighborhoods through which these children walk to school and in which they play have more crime and drugs and fewer adult role models with professional careers. Such children are more often in single-parent families and so get less adult attention. They have fewer cross-country trips, visits to museums and zoos, music or dance lessons, and organized sports leagues to develop their ambition, cultural awareness, and self-confidence.
(To access Mr. Rothstein’s article, go to the ASCD website.)

As Dr. James Cruppi stated in his report to the greater Richmond business community last November,

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the Richmond public schools are getting large numbers of children who are not ready for school, who grow up in single parent homes that don’t (or find it difficult to) reinforce education, require nutritional support, and live in a community environment that makes it very difficult to study and learn. . . . Were these problems in the counties, the schools would also have problems.

The fact is that children like Squaisha come to school carrying terrible baggage. That she is doing well (at least until the fiasco of her missing inoculations) testifies to her remarkable determination to succeed. As I pointed out last fall,

It is clearly not [the] fault [of our students] that they come to the race with a ball and chain around their ankles. I see these children every week and almost all of them are eager to learn and they are making remarkable progress despite the difficulties of their lives. They have dedicated, hard-working teachers. Their schools are run by competent, demanding principals.

Considering that so many of our children live in poverty, it is not so surprising that they do not score as well on SOLs as students with more affluent parents living in the suburbs.* Further, since parents with children approaching school age compare the SOL scores of city and suburban schools they conclude that the city schools are simply not as good.

If is very important to realize, however, that SOLs measure the progress of students, not schools. No school takes SOL exams. Only students do. If students in city schools do not perform as well as students in suburban schools, it does not necessarily mean that the city schools are not as good. As pointed out by Mr. Rothstein, above, if you send two groups of children to schools of equal quality, “the group with greater socioeconomic disadvantage will necessarily have lower average achievement” than will the group without such disadvantage.

I would love to do an experiment. I would love to exchange the student populations of a school in the city and a school in the suburbs. (We wouldn’t tell the parents about the experiment so that their behavior towards their children would not change.) Every day for an entire school year I would bus the suburban kids to the city school and the city kids to the suburban school. The school buildings, administrators and teachers would stay with the original school. I bet that at the end of that year, the suburban kids, now in the city school, would be outperforming the city kids, now in the suburban school. I would make that bet because I am convinced that the disadvantages with which many of our low-income students start school stay with them throughout their educations. Likewise, the advantages that more affluent students carry with them into kindergarten stay with them throughout their educations. Of course, we can never do that experiment and so we will never know whether I would win my bet.

Many of the children who attend Richmond Public Schools have problems that the schools are simply not equipped to deal with. To expect our schools to fix these children’s lives is unreasonable. The entire Richmond community must dedicate itself to improving the lives of our low-income children before they are enrolled in school, thus enabling them to begin their formal education with learning skills equal to their more affluent classmates. This will require us to address some of the issues raised by Dr. Cruppi in his report. Remember, Dr. Cruppi titled the section of his report dealing with RPS “Give Richmond Public Schools a ‘Product’ They Can Work With.”

Does this let RPS off the hook? Definitely not. As I stated when I announced my candidacy for the school board, we must demand excellence from our all students, teachers and administrators. We must not allow the disadvantage that some students have when they enroll in RPS to become an excuse. We need to set high expectations for all our children and then help them to meet these expectations. We may need to consider such options as city funded pre-kindergarten for all children, adding time to our school day for additional learning, offering “signing bonuses” to attract high quality teachers to the schools where our low-income students are concentrated.

All of these options will be costly. However, our children have only one life. Can we deprive them of the quality education that they need because it is too expensive? All of us in the Richmond community must commit ourselves to making sure that all of our children will succeed.

*I realise that many children from low-income backgrounds enter school with all the learning skills they need and achieve at a level equal to more affluent children. The comments in the Cruppi report and the observations by Mr. Rothstein apply to low-income children in general.

School Issues: The Playing Field

In 1986, the Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to James M. Buchanan, Jr., of George Mason University, for his theory that in the public sector actors make decisions based on their perception of their own best interests. In other words when you and I go to the polls every November, or when our senators vote in the United States Senate, or when our city council votes on an ordinance, we all opt for the choice that we think will do us personally the most good.

Maven, what does this have to do with Richmond Public Schools?

Loyal reader, be patient, there is more you have to learn.

In Fairfax County, where I lived when my offspring were wee little ones, to finance new school building construction requires passage of a school-bond referendum by the voters of the county. Western Fairfax County back in the early 1980s was experiencing a population explosion and was suffering from a severe shortage of schools. So, to construct the middle and high school buildings for my children to attend, the county proposed a school board referendum.

In some areas of Fairfax County the population was aging and the public schools were underutilized. In those areas of the county there was great support for a group of public minded citizens called the Fairfax Taxpayers Alliance. Now, there never was a tax, or anything resembling a tax, that the Alliance didn’t oppose. So, whenever the county proposed a bond referendum, the Alliance used all its powers to defeat it. The Alliance appealed to all the residents whose children had already graduated from the public schools, arguing that the referendum was unneeded and that it would incur county debt to help only one portion of the county. Well, even though we in the western part of the county badly needed those schools, the bond referendum was defeated.

Maven, you’re putting them to sleep!

Wait, let me put these things together. The proponents of the Fairfax school bond referendum apparently had not read Dr. Buchanan’s books. They did not realize that people always vote in their perceived best interest and that people who did not have children in overcrowded schools in the western part of the county saw no benefit to themselves in voting for the county to assume additional debt.

Dear reader, a constantly growing proportion of the population of River City does not use the services of Richmond Public Schools. Although the population of the city may have stabilized, the number of children in our schools is constantly plummeting. Census estimates had indicated that the population of Richmond dropped by about 2.5% between 2000 and 2006. However, a recent Times-Dispatch article by Michael Paul Williams stated that Richmond’s population is on the rise again. Richmond population on the rise According to statistics from Richmond Public Schools, on the other hand, the population of students attending our public schools is constantly dropping. The Superintendent of Schools budget proposal for fiscal year 2008-2009 estimates that the school population will drop to less than twenty two thousand children by next year. In the school year 2001-2002 the enrollment was more than twenty five thousand. Statistics on the RPS website indicate that school enrollment goes down about 500 students each year. 1

If Dr. Buchanan’s Pulitzer-winning theory works in Richmond as it apparently worked in Fairfax County early in the 1980s, it means that the number of voters in the city who consider adequate funding of the public schools to be in their own best interest is shrinking. How many of the current members of the City Council represent a district in which the quality of and funding for Richmond Public Schools is really a make-it or break-it issue? Will the winning candidate for mayor in November really need to capture the parent vote to be elected?

Maven, this is getting pretty discouraging.

Not so, dear reader. There is another part of the story you need to hear. After the defeat of the school bond referendum in Fairfax, the pro school construction people changed their tactics. The following year, rather than a bond referendum that would only fund new construction, the county proposal included funding to fix and upgrade older schools throughout the county. Suddenly the number or citizens who could vote for the referendum as being in their best interest increased drastically and the referendum passed. My children got their middle and high schools.

What is the lesson for River City? We have to significantly increase the number of Richmonders who believe that providing the city’s children a first-class education is in their best interest. Based on the enrollment figures, the parents of children in our schools probably don’t have enough clout in the city to go it alone. They must be joined by the business community and the faith community and the civic community and our university communities and the people in the city who don’t have children in our schools. We must all join together as vocal advocates for the children in our city. We must make known to our political leaders that we will hold them accountable if they don’t provide sufficient resources for our children.

We also must act now! We cannot sit around discussing various remedies while our school population keeps dropping by 500 every year. Last year the “Richmond 26” wrote a letter to the mayor and city council about what they perceived as the “emergency” problems of Richmond Public Schools. At the time, this maven commented that although I don’t think that the condition of Richmond Public Schools is really an emergency “we need to deal with Richmond Public Schools as if there were an emergency.” Fix Our Schools, Now.

In the past two years we citizens of Richmond have been exposed to the Superintendent’s “2015 Plan” and the School Board’s “New Direction.” Each was touted as the miracle elixir for Richmond Public Schools. Each seemed to stay as just a plan without any significant implementation. If Richmond Pubic Schools is to win the confidence of the parents in this city it has to stop announcing new plans and start doing something. We do not need to reinvent the wheel every year. We already know things that work elsewhere. Let’s try them here.

We need more AP and other honors programs in all our general high schools. We need more than one IB diploma program in the city. We must at least double the number of our IB middle years programs and must introduce the IB primary years programs in four of our elementary schools.

Will it be costly? Yes.

Will it work? We will never know unless we try.

I am a great believer in IB. I know of its effectiveness in providing a high quality education to all the students in schools where most students were considered at risk.

Do we need to set up further studies? No.

We need to discuss it with our teachers and with our PTAs and then we need to do it. The people of Richmond want action, not more talk or plans.

It’s Just Not Right

I don’t usually like to talk about my volunteer activities, but…

This morning I was tutoring a girl at a local Richmond school. She was very restless and had trouble paying attention. Then she started talking about lunch. I asked her if she had eaten breakfast. She said no, but she had eaten breakfast yesterday.

Dear reader, there is something lacking in a community that let’s its children go to school hungry. We expect our public schools to educate all our children, but no child can learn when her stomach is grumbling and all she can think of is food.

In my humble opinion, it’s just not right.

It’s Really About the Children

Anonymous, one of my most prolific readers, said this in response to my recent post:

I notice you're not making any demands of the parents of the children. I believe that's one of the biggest problems in education anywhere, and it certainly isn't better in the city. How about demanding that the parents do their part to support their children's education by teaching them basic manners, some sort of respect for authority, and participating by volunteering their time?

Well, Anonymous, you are obviously right. And, if I ever get the chance to play God, I am going to redesign the world so that every child has two loving and caring parents. I am going to make sure that every child lives in a stable home where there is sufficient income for each family member to have all of life’s necessities (and a few luxuries too). I will fix things so that parents teach every child basic manners and respect for authority. Of course, every child in my world will be able to attend preschool from at least the age of three and will therefore come into our public schools ready to learn. Each family will have at least one parent who will have the time and energy to volunteer at school for at least two hours every day. A parent will always be available to help each child with homework and to give them the encouragement children need to succeed in life.

Unfortunately, Anonymous, we have been dealt a different hand. Our city has thousands of children who, through no fault of their own, are trapped in a multi-generational cycle of poverty. Many times there is no responsible adult in their lives to teach them the manners and respect you say they should have. They don’t have a parent who has the time and energy to volunteer at school. They don’t live in a family in which the income is sufficient to provide them with life’s necessities. Many of them come to school hungry because there is not enough food for breakfast at home. These are the children that Dr. Crupi talked about in his report last fall:

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the Richmond public schools are getting large numbers of children who are not ready for school, who grow up in single parent homes that don’t (or find it difficult to) reinforce education, require nutritional support, and live in a community environment that that makes it very difficult to study and learn. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that much of the poverty is concentrated in 4000 public housing projects that are primarily located in Fairfield Court, Whitcomb Court, Gilpin Court and Creighton Court.

We, the community living in the City of Richmond have a choice. We can find people to blame, whether it’s the School Board or the Superintendent of Schools or school administrators or teachers or parents. We can throw up our hands in defeat and say that it is hopeless. Or, we can do what is necessary to make sure that our at-risk children have the opportunity to break out of their poverty. A first-class education is probably the only chance many of these children have to succeed in life. We must provide it to them. It is a simple matter of justice.

Raise the Drawbridge, I’m Already Inside

Last year I wrote a particularly sarcastic and nasty piece about Hanover County’s attitude toward the less affluent. It went pretty well unnoticed and that is good. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Besides, since I live in the City of Richmond, how can I possibly understand the attitudes of my neighbors across the Chickahominy River?

My thoughts turned again to Hanover County as I read “Hanover debating Habitat plan” in today’s Times-Dispatch. According to TD reporter Reed Williams the county Board of Supervisors voted to return to the Planning Commission for further consideration a Habitat for Humanity plan to build in the county. This plan had been approved by the Planning Commission last month, but that was before Hanover residents learned of the proposed development.

Hanover Habitat for Humanity is an “ecumenical nonprofit Christian organization committed to eliminating substandard housing through the rehabilitation and building of simple, decent homes for those in need in Hanover County.” Habitat, which has already built or rebuilt 32 homes in Hanover County, seeks to break “the cycle of poverty by offering an opportunity for families to work for a new home.” Families are chosen by Habitat and must invest 350 hours of their own labor in building their home. Habitat arranges for zero-interest mortgages, which allow families to quickly establish equity in their homes.

Residents of the Cheroy Woods and Brown Grove communities, in the area where Habitat is planning to develop, object to the plan for three reasons. First, they say, the concentration of affordable housing in the area will lead to an increase in crime. Second, the Habitat houses would lower the property values of nearby properties. Third, lower income families moving into the area would “bring more foot traffic” to Ashcake Road, which is too narrow to accommodate them.

Now, where do you think my neighbors in Hanover County got the idea that lower income families living in a neighborhood will lead to a higher rate of crime? Can it be from Hanover Sheriff V. Stuart Cook who told the Hanover supervisors that they should heed resident’s concerns about the proposed development? Sheriff Cook told TD reporter Williams that he has seen concentrations of low-income homes create a breeding ground for crime and that he doesn’t want that in Hanover. I appreciate Cook’s desire to keep crime under control in his county, but isn’t his attitude creating stereotypes about people who live in affordable housing. And, dear reader, isn’t it stereotypes and the fears they produce what this is all about?

The residents of Cheroy Woods and Brown Grove oppose the Habitat development proposal because they are afraid that lower income families somehow produce crime. They are also afraid that lower income families will allow their homes to run down thus lowering the market value of other homes in the neighborhood. These fears are based on stereotypes. (I won’t talk about Ashcake Road because I’ve never seen it, but isn’t the assumption that lower-income families will bring more foot traffic to an area also based on stereotype)? Do the people up in Hanover really believe that all poorer people are criminals? Do they really believe that poorer people will have so little pride in their property that they will let it deteriorate?

The problem, friends, is that we’re dealing here with fear. And, as I hinted earlier in the week talking about the fear of some parents to send their kids to Richmond Public Schools, fear is not a rational feeling. It comes from the most primitive parts of our brain. I’m not sure how you dispel the fear other than showing that it is not rational. In the case of Hanover County that would be done by approving the Habitat development and then letting the present residents realize that their fears were unfounded. However, I don’t really believe that’s going to happen. Leaders of the anti-Habitat residents have made it clear that they will come out in large numbers to make sure that the Planning Commission doesn’t make the same mistake again.

For She’s a Jolly Good County

Years, perhaps decades, ago, while I was sojourning in northern Virginia, the District of Columbia had a sex problem. Well, it wasn’t exactly a sex problem; it really was a problem with too many women selling sex a few short blocks from the White House. (I am not implying that being close to the White House created a good market for these women. I assume it was merely a coincidence.) Anyhow, the newspapers wrote a story about it and the Chief of Police decided that these working women could no longer be tolerated along 14th Street. So, on one glorious night, hundreds of police officers took time off from protecting the city from serious crime and dedicated their efforts to freeing the city from vice. Countless women of the night were arrested and carted off. The next day the police put all the offending women in trucks, drove them across the 14th Street Bridge and released them in Arlington. And for one brief shining moment the District of Columbia had no prostitution problem.

This story popped into my head this morning while I was reading the news on page one of the Times-Dispatch. It wasn’t the story about LandAmerica cutting eleven hundred jobs, which is pretty bad news. It wasn’t the story about speed bumps and traffic circles, which isn’t news at all. It was the headline that read “Hanover boasts lowest poverty rate for its size.” The story was contained in the first paragraph, one sentence long: “New census figures released yesterday listed Hanover County with the lowest poverty rate in the nation among counties of its population.”

At first I was giddy with joy. Our neighbor, only a few miles away, had apparently fixed its poverty problem. This was great news indeed, especially after last week’s depressing cover story in Style Weekly, which suggested that Richmond Public Schools can never succeed because of the city’s high concentration of poverty. Hey, if Hanover County has such a low poverty rate they must be doing something that we can copy in Richmond. So what is it they are doing?

I read the article again. There wasn’t any clear explanation for how Hanover had achieved this great feat. The director of the county’s Department of Social Services was surprised by the low poverty rate. She had expected it to be twice as high. But she did make it clear that this low poverty rate didn’t mean that her job was unneeded. There are “many other residents who can’t make their mortgage, car, and day-care payments without [our] assistance.”

Hey, that’s it! The director of Social Services has been making so many assistance payments to residents of Hanover County that they no longer qualify as poor. Now they are merely strapped for cash. Hanover’s solution is easy. Give money to poor people and they will no longer be poor. Why hadn’t we in Richmond thought of it? How simple! We can eliminate our poverty problem by simply giving out more money.

But, wait! The next paragraph suggests that maybe Hanover didn’t do the obvious. It says that development in Hanover County has concentrated on single-family housing, which attracts married families. As everybody knows poverty is lowest among married families and highest among households headed by single women. (And you thought that the marriage amendment was stupid!) The article quoted a demographer (if you know your classical languages, you may understand what such a person does) as suggesting that Hanover had a lower rate of poverty because it was “family concentrated.”

So now things are making more sense. Hanover has less poverty because it has become unfriendly to the poor. It simply provides them with no affordable housing. They can’t live in Hanover if there is no place for them to live.

But would Hanover County be so Machiavellian? Would it deliberately control its zoning and development processes to exclude affordable housing for the less-affluent? Would government officials act this way in the 21st Century?

Wait! Isn’t this the same Hanover County that has Robert Setliff as the Chair of its county Board of Supervisors? Isn’t Setliff the person who was quoted in last week’s Style as saying that the problems of Richmond’s public schools is “none of [Hanover County’s] business,” and sees no value in regional cooperation? Is it so far-fetched that the leaders of such a county would avoid the problems that come with poverty by making sure that poor people stay in Richmond where they belong? Are they any different than the D.C. police who dealt with prostitution by trying to make it Arlington’s problem?

So, the next time you’re driving north and see a “Welcome to Hanover County” sign be sure to read the fine print that says “unless you’re poor.” Then read the engraving on Hanover’s statue of liberty:

Send us your wealthy and your white,
Your middle class we urge from you to flee,
Your wretched refuse we don’t want,
Keep your homeless and your weak,
Across the Chickahominy they can’t cross.