Twenty years ago, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a commentator who called it as he saw it, wrote a treatise in “American Scholar” titled “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which he postulated that societies relax the definition of activities deemed as requiring social control. “The number of deviances which come to a society’s attention are limited by the kind of equipment it uses to detect and handle them,” he said.
The most recent Community Outlook Survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (see story, page 1) flips that concept upside down to expand the definition of poverty. It introduces new tools to detect economic rather than social deviance – that of poverty in the suburbs. The yardstick isn’t the federal poverty level income for a family of four, which at just about $24,000 nationwide is far too low to include everyone who might be struggling with high living costs. The report uses median incomes as cited in census tracts, focusing on New Haven and Hartford and their suburbs, where median incomes are in the $40,000 to $50,000 range for a family of four.
The report debuts in a social environment in which academics and economists seem to be more receptive to the idea of the existence of economic stress in the suburbs while cities bloom. The idea of a downtown renaissance in Boston, which includes transferees from the suburbs who move to the city by choice, is prompting economic types to question the viability of the suburbs. But that’s a side issue to a problem which, like the poor in the Irish proverb, has always been with us.
The Fed report, the result of surveys of service providers in the six New England states done last April, is broad enough to allow extrapolation beyond New Haven/Hartford. The equipment used to detect and handle the issue of relative poverty were three new questions added to the semiannual survey, which sought to get more specific answers from suburban rather than urban respondents. The responses reveal that households with income far above the federal poverty line struggle to pay the costs of suburban life.
The study’s authors say the report is intended to define the problem, rather than offer solutions – those will need further thought and analysis. A lack of discretionary purchasing power has many adverse downstream effects on the futures of families, but also on the municipalities in which they live. The causes of suburban poverty – lack of jobs, an aging demographic or a too-costly supply system – will have to be addressed in discussions and consensus beyond the scope of the report.
We’re just glad the Fed Boston is calling it as it is. For decades, struggling suburban households would have fallen under the definition of “deviant” in the academic rather than the judgmental sense, though they might keenly feel a sense of judgment. Now, with economic crisis serving as more of a leveler, the stress cracks are more apparent, giving us the beginning of a road map of what we need to do to repair the weak points.
