Chicago must reverse spiral of poverty, shootings

Jens Ludwig of U. of C. Crime Lab says murders prompt flight which produces still more murders

Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, addresses the City Club of Chicago Wednesday. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

CHICAGO — Poverty and gun violence worsen one another in a spiral that can be and needs to be reversed, according to the director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

Jens Ludwig, director of the Crime Lab, spoke at the City Club of Chicago Wednesday on “Crime and Poverty in Chicago.” He said racial and economic disparities helped produce much of the city’s gun violence, and he blamed that for Chicago’s higher murder rate than that of Los Angeles, which he said has no community as economically disadvantaged as several neighborhoods on the West and South sides.

Ludwig pointed to figures showing that the U.S. poverty rate had steadily declined from the Great Depression through the late ‘60s immediately following President Johnson’s War on Poverty. “It looks like this was a problem that was really within the grasp of the United States to solve,” he said. “But really no long-term progress” since, he added, as it has fluctuated at about 12 percent.

Ludwig drew stunning parallels between Lincoln Park — which has seen the murder rate drop from 24 per 100,000 in the mid-’80s to four per 100,000 today, an 85 percent decrease — and Garfield Park, which has seen the murder rate more than double from 46 per 100,000 in the mid-’80s to 100 per 100,000 today.

Do the math, and the murder rate in Garfield Park is 25 times what it is in Lincoln Park.

While Chicago’s murder rate has dropped dramatically since a spike in 2016, back down to levels approaching the ‘60s, “the progress we have been making is incredibly uneven across the city,” Ludwig said. “Poverty is an incredibly important driver for crime — and gun violence in particular.”

Ludwig illustrated that gun violence was prompting people to move out, which produced hollowed-out neighborhoods, which in turn produced more violence. He cited a study in Philadelphia in which a random selection of vacant lots were converted into parks. The immediate areas that received that improvement saw a 29 percent reduction in shootings compared against areas that did not see that sort of investment.

Pointing out that four of five Chicago murders take place in public places, Ludwig said that created an “extremely harmful” environment. He cited statistics showing that, for every murder, 70 local residents move out, and for those left behind it’s even worse. Residents living within a half-mile of a murder saw a 43 percent increase in mental-health problems, with an exponential effect on education, employment, domestic violence, and violent crime. He said most Englewood residents live within a half-mile of where a murder has been committed.

By contrast, a 29 percent drop in shootings, he stated, produced a half-year leap in education levels for local students.

Ludwig emphasized, however, that it’s not just about building parks in troubled areas. “There are a bunch of moving parts here that need to be sorted out,” he added.

A slide from Jens Ludwig’s presentation at the City Club of Chicago. (University of Chicago Crime Lab)

One of the primary issues was education. Chicago Public Schools have improved their graduation rate across the board, but 83 percent of white males graduate compared to 63 percent of African-American males — not great, but not a terrible disparity. Ludwig said the real issue is that 34 percent of white males go on to graduate from college, with significantly higher earning potential, but just 10 percent of African-American males do the same. With earning potential increasingly stratified between high-school dropouts, grads, and those holding associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and master’s degrees — contributing to income inequality — that was leaving large segments of the population behind.

“In the economy of 2020, a high-school degree is no longer a legitimate goalpost,” Ludwig said.

At the same time, he added, education is the best tool for keeping kids out of the criminal-justice system, but placing kids in detention tends to undermine that, producing an increased dropout rate and, in turn, an increased arrest rate — the so-called prison pipeline President Obama made an issue. Meanwhile, an estimated 53 percent of inmates in state prisons have a drug problem, but only 15 percent receive treatment for it — another area that needs to be addressed.

According to Ludwig, Chicago ranks 32nd out of the top 50 U.S. cities in social mobility, but when one cross-references racial disparities with the overall limited social mobility it makes Chicago the worst city in the country for that.

Ludwig recommended incremental improvements to break and reverse that spiral of poverty and crime. “If we don’t fix the violence problem, we are condemning more and more communities to being hollowed out,” he said. At the same time he cast doubt on programs that add a little pocket money to people making as little as $5,000 a year. A $3,000 bump might provide a 60 percent increase, he said, but the $8,000 total would still be insufficient. “We need to be realistic about the scale of the investment we need,” he said. He was open to reparations, comparing them to reparations paid by his native Germany following World War II and the Holocaust.

Local improvements, Ludwig noted, can also prompt gentrification, which might be great for a neighborhood like Lincoln Park, but can displace families to areas that feel the ill effects, like Garfield Park.

Ludwig said the causes of poverty and violence were complex and interrelated, but that interrelationship can also be reversed. Drops in gun violence create safer neighborhoods that encourage people to move in, which in turn makes them more vital.

“You don’t need a professor from the University of Chicago to tell you that it’s extremely harmful for people to live and grow up in neighborhoods exposed to community violence,” Ludwig said. “The research does tell us that more surprising is the magnitude” of the effects those residents feel.