Festival at the key school and welcome to our panel income inequality in todays america. We are here to talk with Stephanie Deluca and kathryn edin. Am going to read their bios and then offered an opportunity to discuss their books as well as offering you all some come as some questions so we will get started. Stephanie deluca is an associate professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins university. Shes a sociologica a sociologie to inform education, housing policy and she was awarded a William GrantFoundation Scholars award to study residential mobility, neighborhoods in family life among very poor families in the south. She is coming working on a mixed message study on longterm neighborhood in School Equality as well as childrens education outcomes. She contributes greatly to national and local media including baltimore sun, washington post, education week. Atlanta, the new yorker and the National Public radio. And National Public radio. Transcendence work is been published in several academic journals and should present her work as part of an exhibit at the National Museum of american history. She was appointed to the Macarthur FoundationResearch Network on the effects of housing on Young Children as a fellow at the Century Foundation and as a member of the policy Advisory Board at the reinvestment fund. Dr. Deluca under phd in Human Development and social policy at Northwestern University and bachelors degree in psychology and sociology at the university of chicago. Please welcome dr. Deluca. [applause] kathryn edin is one of the nations leading poverty researchers working in the domains of welfare and lowwage work, family life and neighborhood context. The hallmark of a research is our direct indepth observations of the life of low income women, men and children. Dr. Edin has authored six books including the one she is here to discuss today, 2. 00 a day living on almost nothing in america, and some 50 journal articles. She is a bloomberg distinguished professor of sociology and Public Health at Johns Hopkins university. Formerly shows a professor of Public Policy in management at the Harvard Kennedy school and chair of the Multidisciplinary Program in inequality and social policy. Dr. Edin is a Founding Member of the Macarthur Foundation funded network on housing and families with Young Children, and it has been of the Macarthur Network on the family and the economy. They are both coauthors of the seminal 2016 publication coming of age in the other america, the other book to discussed today which was nine Years Research between 20032012 on Baltimore City kids from impoverished neighborhoods. It tracks of progress in various areas including education, employment, family status, mental and physical health, and risk behaviors. Please welcome dr. Deluca and dr. Edin once more. [applause] so lets begin with both of you taking some time to discuss the books that year to talk about today. Well, thanks so much for spending your saturday morning with us. This ithis is a real treat to b. So im going to take you back in time with main about 2003. So i just finished a phd in Human Development and social policy in chicago and moved to baltimore to take a job at Johns Hopkins, as somewhat of an expert on urban poverty. Except in the five years that it took to do my phd, i had managed to not speak to one single poor person myself. Let alone a poor person of gold. You can get a phd in iraq that, right . Crunching numbers are really important policy changes in neighborhood data, but it is perfectly respectable to do that but im from the southside of chicago, and back there you dont really feel like you know anything unless youve talked to someone in person. At least thats how i was raised. At some point it was just getting to be too much. I had to get away from the numbers and get into the streets of baltimore and joined a project that kathy had actually started a few years before. Our journey began quite a while ago together. So i started this project looking at the impacts of housing policies in Baltimore City, and i fell in love with baltimore and was transformed as a scholar. My going into the neighborhoods in baltimore, i was told precisely to never go to when i first moved here. The first interview that i can remember that really changed the game for me was with a young man. Ability to interview him in east baltimore e. Meadow st. And i have 32 pages of Interview Questions them i had memorized the soweto use paper and pen when we do interviews because the kind of makes it feel like youre at a Doctors Office or doing a survey and that ruins it. But it may be hard to believe this but i was not very good back then. I wasnt yet at doing interviews with anyone but i wasnt the best person on the team for talking to young men. Again, says very little about the team that anything else. I wade through a couple of active drug used to go into juvon house into the back deeper a home kitchen and savannah try to talk to them. We want to understand what the impacts of neighborhoods and families and schools and growing up in poverty, went into with all these questions. In the first few minutes juvon as very polite and he sang yes maam, you know, maam. But its not jelling, right . Its not working. I had no choice but to go off script and i said what kind of music do you like . He said i would like heavy metal music. I said i really liked heavy metal music when i was growing up and thats what kids can like kids on the southside it is listened to heavy metal music instead of really doing bad things. It just made it seem like were doing bad things and not getting into trouble. He said i like greek mythology. I said i really like greek mythology. Physics, isaac did. Physics ate nothing but math with double sites mixed into it. Then we are on fire, right . Its jelling. We got to all the questions about poverty and school being in disarray in baltimore and the challenges of having grown up in a highrise in east baltimore, highrise in downtown that was eventually torn down and living in east baltimore. At the end of the interview he said, you are pretty cool for a white girl. And if were going to high School Together we might have been friends. And i thought wow, that went well that i got some sociology out of it and we had some fun. I would never, it would take seven years to understand that these Passion Projects that juvon was talking about would be so important. It would take years to figure that out. I just thought the unit had gone well and i was on my way to being sociology his next barbara walters. But why were we in east baltimore, why were we in baltimore to begin with . This goes back a bit to the late 1980s, early 1990s. Ive been to become clear that instead of, instead of innercity poverty reducing in the wake of the civil rights era, the Voting Rights act, the Fair Housing Act of the cities, innercity poverty had increased and become more concentrated. William julius wilsons work on the true disadvantage had made this really clear. Others would say such as late and american apartheid racial segregation what we thought had gone away at also got worse and had become enormously deleterious to the lives of families and children. And number obvious was this failure of urban policy evident than in the highrise projects in our inner cities across america. In the early 1990s at the federal government did two things to respond to the journalistic account of children being hurt of nonstop Drug Trafficking and violence in neighborhoods like east and west baltimore. The first thing that happened, the federal government decided to tear down the largest highrises in our American Cities so it is deemed topic to the families and children inside. The second thing is an experience of moving to opportunity was born. That would give families and children in five cities, new york, chicago, l. A. , baltimore boston a chance to leave highrises and moved to lower poverty neighborhoods. Things in baltimore wer or so de that both programs came here. This is what a Research Project was born, to try to understand how the fortunes of families and children who at companies communities come how they would change if they had a chance to leave. Thats our project got started. We learned quite a bit about the power of housing policy. Ill say one quick thing about that. Which is its not just the family and child is born into but the neighborhood he or she grows up in that shapes he our fate. We now have over 30 years of evidence pointing to this clear compelling fact that we know enough to act on this. Neighborhood poverty is a liability. And diminishes the life chances of our most vulnerable children, especially children of color. What we saw happen in baltimore are in normas intergenerational gains in Educational Attainment and other behaviors as a result of the children having left of the projects through these programs we study. Just one example. The 150 young men young men and women we followed from the ages of zero to ten when the parents signed up for the chance to leave the project through ages 1524 over a decade later, these children grew up in households were only about a third of them had a primary caregiver who had a High School Diploma or a ged. Sorry. Over 70 of these young people would go on to finish high school in this next generation. 13 growth as a caregiver that that had tried college or trade school. Half our sample would want to do that. 70 of High School Grads took enormous intergenerational gains in baltimore of all places. Because of housing policy about these kids to live part of the childhood in neighborhoods that were safer with more working neighbors and less worried about gunfire, more role model for what was possible in life. Parents also enjoyed Mental Health benefits on par with best practices and antidepressant medication therapies. Moving out of the dangers. Housing policy as house policy. They were the kinds of parents that they felt like that always wanted to be but couldnt be. This is one big lesson we learn that intergenerational disadvantage is inevitable. We can change it with social policy. We know this now. The second thing we discovered goes back to the passion project that i first observed with juvon in that kitchen in east baltimore. The single biggest predictor of young people being on track by the end of our study in School Working or both which was most kids as i said, we saw this big intergenerational gains but what explained the difference between 80 of the kids are on track and 20 that had not managed to get their was something we called identity project. Finding a passion, something to be about, create an outlet, a hobby, a job, activities you did with your friends or in making music, japanese animation, greek mythology, debate, raising puppies in the kitchen cabinet. Whatever, whatever, it came in a million different colors. We saw this incredible resilience and he came in a number of different forms. Some of this was kids by themselves to escape route that engage. We sat down with vicki in west baltimore and in 15 minutes she couldnt take it anymore. We just had not come to think wanted to talk about. Do you all want to see my birds . She had been racing pigeons in a backyard, and thats where she went when she need to get away from the carousels 13 at more people circling in the house they are night which helped a lot when vicki was prone to bouts of anger. She had a chance to escape. We sought more institutionally support identity project, especially for young men in the form of jobs or activities like the police explores leak. Late. We met a number of young men who when we met them said as you can see im a working man picked because they had a badge on for the Johns Hopkins security, or a police explores badge or the scrubs for a certified nursing assistant job like gary had. These uniforms were a point of pride in their neighborhoods, a point of social inclusion and a point of being, and a point that distinguish them from being a likely suspect when they were stopped by the police. In addition to as martin said a reason to think bigger about what comes next. Its not just about cleaning the dining room at burger king. Its about something bigger than that. And his identity projects were the very same that sparked the grid we heard so much about, the last five or ten years. The grid that really dissing bush is the key to get ahead and continue. That doesnt come out of nowhere. It needs to be sparked. We saw this with tony who took an internship through youth works ended up in university of maryland with the Pharmacy School delivering specimens and mail to doctors. He said being about this kinds of people, thats what gave me the spark. He literally use the word sparked my interest to become a pharmacist. He couldnt afford to enroll right away. Every semester he would finish a couple of courses, take this list off the bridge, check them off, keep going. Thats great. So we saw this in all of these expenses that let kids say im about something. Im not about the street. Im not about these friends. Im about these mentors and teachers. That was our second big lesson of the book, that young people ages 1524, those thoughts or loss caused by Public Policy debate in favor of much younger child policy, zero to five, preschool and reading programs. These young adults are announces assets with enormous potential. Especially in cities like baltimore. But what weve seen as a retrenchment, the kind of funding and policies that provide the raw material for the identity projects to form in the first place. This support in part we think, whats been pulled away in favor of accountability policy in schools but also because of the sense that these young adults are threats, not assets. Because we have never experienced such levels of racial and economic segregation in our history as we have right now, because of this we are virtual strangers to each other because we live in such different communities. In the kinds of stories kathy and susan and i were able to share in this book between the other america would be scheduled working so hard to get ahead and still struggle and the america, the wealthy were isolated from each other. What this isolation does is allow us to be vulnerable to really poor sources of information like those images in april 2015 of the few kids who were throwing bricks after the death of freddie gray. If anything, we found that these kids are the exception, not the norm. Fewer than one out of five young people ever turn to the streets. But you would never know that just watching the news. We think this kind of isolation breeds, dementia support for Public Policies like those that would be invested in youth centers, arts and sports and Music Education and so on. So to big takeaways, housing policy is a game changer, and Youth Investment policy can be a game changer. Even in a least likely place in central baltimore. Its really hard to leave that store and move on to the story of 2. 00 a day. So compelling. Often think of poverty is a matter of character right . Its about laziness or its about a lack of mainstream norms or values. The profound thing about what this experiment did, it would be an experience arcades and participated in. Simply move the same family to a different place. And it wasnt even the best place to it were not moving to the park. There may be moving to hamilton or bel air or a suburb, in a suburb of baltimore, and yet there lies were so powerfully transformed. So it speaks to the power of place as stephanie said and the power of investing in young people. Its really a very hopeful story because its hard to change peoples character, but its not so hard to change the places in which we allow children to grow up. So 2. 00 a day also has its origins in baltimore. And the book came about by accident. All the books i think have their origins or else studies have their origin story. I was actually in baltimore for the summer, teaching at harvard at the time to meet these kids that stephanie just talked about and to interview them and to hang out with them. So my family moved to baltimore for the summer, and you know, so we were in the homes of these young people and the parents. And one day my assignment was to knock on the door of this young women act would involve her family over the years that we hadnt seen her in a long time. We knew she had a new baby, and so we went to the homes on madison avenue, kind of tucked into the shadow of the prison. We knocked on the door and ashley came to the door. You do this for a while, you could tell when something is wrong, right . So ashley is not making eye contact. Shes visibly unkempt. Shes passing her child from shoulder to shoulder to comfort the baby is crying, she tried to comfort the baby, but shes neglecting to do the critical thing that all parents know you got to do when you have an infant, right . You put the hand here to keep the babies had from rocking as you move the child pics of this wasnt happening. We follow ashley up the stairs, and you get to the apartments and there