JUDY WOODRUFF: But first:
Our economics correspondent,
Paul Solman, is continuing
to chronicle some
of the problems with
inequality across the country.
Tonight, he looks at the
possibility of moving
up the economic ladder
by moving out to other
communities.
It's part of his weekly
series, Making Sense.
KRISTEN HOPPER, Mother: I
want better for my family.
PAUL SOLMAN: Kristen Hopper
expressing the economic motto
of America even before the
states united.
So, you want your kids to do
better than you have done?
KRISTEN HOPPER: A
hundred percent.
PAUL SOLMAN: The 35-year-old
mother of four has gone the
extra miles to make that happen.
With help from the Interfaith
Council for Action, a housing
nonprofit, she's uprooted
her family from hardscrabble
Yonkers, New York, where she
herself grew up, and has in
effect emigrated a mere 20 miles
north, but in some respects
a world away, to Ossining,
New York.
Ossining may be home to Sing
Sing Prison, where criminals
are still sent up the river
from New York City, but this
is suburbia, a place with far
better prospects for 2-year-old
twins Robert and Juliet
(ph), 10-year-old
Josie, 14-year-old Gio.
KRISTEN HOPPER: The last place
that I lived, it wasn't safe
for my kids to walk around
in.
There was a shoot-out.
They have all kinds of gangs.
I know that, if I stayed
there, my kids would
be in the streets too.
PAUL SOLMAN: But instead of the
streets, Gio is in after-school
clubs, pre-law, pre-business
and The Ossining
High School Current.
GIOVANNI ROSADO, Student:
I want to become a lawyer.
And I'm trying to work on that.
PAUL SOLMAN: So that you
can do better economically?
GIOVANNI ROSADO: Yes.
Yes.
PAUL SOLMAN: How much better is
it for you and for the kids...
ROBERT BRUNNER, Fiance of
Kristen Hopper: Oh my God.
PAUL SOLMAN: ... to be living...
ROBERT BRUNNER: It's amazing.
PAUL SOLMAN: Hopper's
fiance, Robert Brunner.
ROBERT BRUNNER: The safety
is 1,000 times different
than it is in a hood area.
And to fit in, in those places,
you have to be rough and tough,
and it's a totally different
child.
It changes the child.
PAUL SOLMAN: As it
changed Brunner, who did
and dealt drugs, like
the hallucinogen PCP,
angel dust.
ROBERT BRUNNER: It's embalming
fluid and jet propellant.
That's the mix of it.
I used to sell it.
I used to do all that crap.
Craziness.
PAUL SOLMAN: The craziness
climaxed when he crashed his
car while high, was in a coma
for 18 months.
ROBERT BRUNNER: My father --
like, when the doctor say, you
know, your son has no brain
activity, he's -- he won't
even be able to function, so
then they pull the plug on me.
They basically pull it
out to see if you can
breath on your own.
And then, if you
do, you're good.
And if you don't, you're done.
PAUL SOLMAN: Do you think that
a kid as smart as Gio is, would
he have been vulnerable to
taking angel dust?
ROBERT BRUNNER: I think,
if the crowd is doing it,
I think he would do it.
Peer pressure isn't
easy, you know?
PAUL SOLMAN: And thus the
move upriver, different
peers, different pressures.
Just ask Gio and Josie.
GIOVANNI ROSADO: The people
down in Yonkers, they
are very mean, in a way.
PAUL SOLMAN: Mean?
GIOVANNI ROSADO: Yes.
They, like, get angry a lot
and they like to pick on kids,
and I didn't really enjoy
that.
JOSEPHINA GRAVENESE, Student:
And, in Ossining, there's like
kids who are like so nice to
you.
When it was my first day, the
kids were asking me like, do
you want to play and stuff?
It's just not like
Yonkers at all.
PAUL SOLMAN: But it could be
that the people in Yonkers are
as mean as they are, to use
your word, because they
don't see much of a future
for themselves there.
GIOVANNI ROSADO: That's true.
PAUL SOLMAN: Where people here
do see a future for themselves.
GIOVANNI ROSADO: Yes.
PAUL SOLMAN: Which is
their mom's whole point.
KRISTEN HOPPER: I want to show
them that in order to be able
to live well, and not live
paycheck to paycheck, not have
to be on social services, not
that it's a bad thing -- and
I'm grateful for all the help
that I have, but I definitely
want them to do better than
me.
PAUL SOLMAN: Now, some might
say that shouldn't be hard in
this case, but here's the stark
fact that prompted our trip
to Westchester: The odds no
longer favor American kids doing
better than their parents.
RAJ CHETTY, Stanford
University: It's basically
a coin flip at this point.
NATHANIEL HENDREN,
Harvard University: Yes,
it's just a remarkable
decline in our country
in terms of the fraction
of our kids earning
more than their parents.
PAUL SOLMAN: Economists Raj
Chetty and Nat Hendren study
economic inequality, growing
in America for decades, as
you have so often heard.
But inequality itself might
not be so bad if we all had
a fair shot at the platinum
ring.
Problem is:
NATHANIEL HENDREN: The fraction
of kids earning more than their
parents has fallen from above
90 percent four decades ago
to about 50 percent today.
PAUL SOLMAN: And so people
who are worried about this for
their kids are right to worry.
NATHANIEL HENDREN: Absolutely.
It used to be that everybody
could count on this, that your
kids were going to grow up
to earn more than you.
And, today, it's not just
something that's a feature
of the American economy.
PAUL SOLMAN: So what can a
poor family with an American
dream do to increase the odds
of the kids moving up?
Move out.
NATHANIEL HENDREN:
We see that in places
where kids of different
economic backgrounds are
mixing in the same environment,
those tend to be places where
kids from low-income backgrounds
rise up further in the
income distribution.
PAUL SOLMAN: Kind of
like Ossining, where
a plaque commemorates
Alexis de Tocqueville's
visit almost 200 years ago.
He wrote: "When inequality is
the general rule in society,
the greatest inequalities
attract no attention."
KRISTEN HOPPER: You have
some really wealthy people.
You have some people in poverty.
It's kind of balanced.
PAUL SOLMAN: And
that helps your kids?
KRISTEN HOPPER: Yes, I want
them to understand that there
is hard life, that there's good
life.
PAUL SOLMAN: So they can see
the good life, and they see
it's attainable you mean?
KRISTEN HOPPER: Yes.
Of course.
Of course, because the
reverse is also true.
RAJ CHETTY: Places that are
more segregated by race or by
income tend to have lower levels
of upward mobility.
PAUL SOLMAN: Consider inner-city
Baltimore, which we visited
two years ago, when violence
erupted following the death of
Freddie Gray in police custody.
According to these young
ministers-in-training,
the near-absence of
upward mobility fueled
the protesters' anger.
MAN: People aren't feeling
like they can succeed
in life or get above.
MAN: It's like we're all living
in this dump or this war zone.
MAN: Living in the dilapidated
areas which they live in, they
feel like they're not loved.
They feel like
they're not cared for.
RAJ CHETTY: If you think about
what's gone on in Baltimore,
it's a place of tremendous
concentrated poverty.
PAUL SOLMAN: Chetty and
Hendren have looked closely at
Baltimore, reanalyzing data from
a mid-1990s experiment in which
the federal government gave
poor families housing vouchers
to move to better neighborhoods.
Twenty years later:
RAJ CHETTY: The kids who
moved at young ages are
dramatically better as adults.
They're earning 30 percent more.
They're 27 percent more likely
to go to college, something like
30 percent less likely to have
a teenage pregnancy, relative
to the kids who stayed in the
high-poverty public housing
projects.
And so there's clear
scientific evidence that
you can dramatically
change kids' outcomes
just based on
where they grow up.
PAUL SOLMAN: What does
it say on your arm?
DESTINY TURTURIELLO, 17
Years Old: "Only the strong
survive," in Chinese.
PAUL SOLMAN: But back
in Yonkers, 17-year-old
Destiny Turturiello, a
family friend of Kristen
Hopper's from the old
neighborhood, can't get out.
A minor with no legal guardian,
she's even having trouble
getting back into school, having
dropped out when kids
bullied her for doing her
homework during lunch.
She used to give
as good as she got.
DESTINY TURTURIELLO: If you
look at me, just like how
you're looking at me now...
PAUL SOLMAN: Yes?
DESTINY TURTURIELLO: ... I might
just fight you two years ago.
PAUL SOLMAN: You would fight me?
What do you mean?
DESTINY TURTURIELLO:
I would just be like,
what are you staring at?
Is there a problem?
And then I would have hit you.
And then I would have went about
my day, because I feel like I
just took my anger out on you.
PAUL SOLMAN: She's learned to
manage her anger, but she's
still in Yonkers, which has deep
pockets of poverty not far
from upscale, affluent areas.
DESTINY TURTURIELLO: What
am I doing with my life?
I'm not doing
anything productive.
What am I going to
be later on in life?
Am I going to be something?
If I could change on
living in Yonkers, I
would do it 100 percent.
PAUL SOLMAN: But
Turturiello, like millions
of other Americans,
can't afford to move to
a better community.
Kristen Hopper only managed
with help from benefactors.
But finances weren't
the only factor.
KRISTEN HOPPER: It was hard for
me to disconnect from friends.
Like, what am I going to do
if I have nobody you know?
And when I actually did it,
many people were shocked.
PAUL SOLMAN: Shocked,
she says, and resentful.
Is the resentment similar to
the resentment that so many
Americans feel towards people
who are just doing much
better that they're
doing in this economy?
KRISTEN HOPPER: I have
felt that resentment hard.
PAUL SOLMAN: The
status distinction.
KRISTEN HOPPER: Yes.
I did.
I did.
PAUL SOLMAN: Location, location,
location, an old saw in real
estate, but one with poignant
new pertinence in today's
increasingly immobile economy.
For the "PBS NewsHour," this
is economics correspondent
Paul Solman, reporting from
Westchester, New York.