Are you a member of local government who wants to increase upward mobility in your community? If so, this guide can help you better understand impediments to upward mobility and build a cross-sector team that can plan, advocate for, and implement a set of systems changes focused on bringing all members of your community out of poverty and creating more equitable results.
Boosting upward mobility and narrowing racial and ethnic inequities in our communities are some of the foremost challenges of our time. Stagnating rates of economic mobility in the US in recent decades have cast doubt on the promise that talent and hard work lead to advancement. Research shows that the poorest adults are unlikely to rise to the middle of the income distribution, much less to the top (Acs and Zimmerman 2008; Bradbury 2016). And children growing up in families living in poverty are far more likely than other children to experience poverty as adults (Acs, Elliott, and Kalish 2016; Ratcliffe and McKernan 2010; Wagmiller and Adelman 2009).
Everyone deserves the chance to improve their lives: to move up and out of poverty, be valued and feel they belong, and have the power and autonomy to shape the decisions that affect their future. But people striving to achieve upward mobility face a web of interconnected barriers that often impede or undermine their best efforts. For most people experiencing poverty in the US today, opportunities to achieve greater economic success, power, autonomy, and dignity are blocked by long-standing structural barriers, not by a failure of individual effort. Poverty, precarity, and inequality are not inevitable consequences of market economies nor are they substantially the result of individual deficits or behaviors by the people experiencing these conditions. Instead, these outcomes are largely caused by public policies and institutional practices that can be changed.
Centuries of discriminatory policies and practices against people of color have produced persistent racial disparities in outcomes. For example, slavery, government-sanctioned occupational segregation of workers of color, Jim Crow laws, and the exclusion of people of color from New Deal programs and union membership have disproportionately concentrated people of color in low-wage occupations (Spievack et al. 2020). The practice of redlining—denying mortgage loans to people in certain neighborhoods based on the race, ethnicity, and immigration status of its residents—as well as the construction of segregated public housing, unfair zoning laws, and the subsidization of white-only suburbs by the government have created stark and persistent racial disparities in homeownership, wealth, and school funding (Deich, Fedorowicz, and Turner 2022; Rothstein 2017; Spievack et al. 2020) and have isolated people of color into neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. And disproportionate policing of communities of color and harsh sentencing laws have led to mass incarceration of people of color—particularly Black and Latinx people—through the criminal legal system, which has facilitated continued repression rather than rehabilitation (National Research Council 2014).
Policies and programs aimed at helping people navigate existing systems and surmount structural barriers provide critical benefits to some individuals and families but leave barriers in place for many, therefore failing to achieve adequate population-level gains or reductions in racial inequities. Current programs help too few of those in need, provide support in too few of the dimensions where support is needed, offer benefits at levels that are too low to allow most people to achieve enduring economic mobility, and fail to target the root causes of inequities in our communities. Because barriers to mobility are upheld by our current systems and structures, removing those barriers will require both systems change and an equitable approach to support that gets it to those most in need.
Taking a systems-change approach means looking at how systemic failures intersect. For example, an issue such as low workforce participation may stem from a combination of low education rates, poor transit access, unreliable child care options, low wages, and workplace discrimination. And many of these systemic failures were caused and are perpetuated by racist beliefs, norms, policies, and practices that have produced deep and persistent racial inequities in our communities.
Solving such multifaceted problems requires not only addressing the root causes of failures within a particular system but also working across systems to address intersecting and compounding issues. Increasing workforce participation, for example, may call for a transportation department to both expand public transit access along its existing lines and collaborate with a housing department to align new residential developments with these transit options. In turn, the housing department might collaborate with child care providers to determine where to locate new day care centers.
Clearly, bringing about systemic change to boost upward mobility is no simple task, and large-scale change cannot be made by government alone. But counties and cities have powerful data, policy levers, and capacity that can catalyze this change. You can bring this resource to your community to kick off the development of a local Mobility Action Plan (MAP) in collaboration with local nonprofits, community-based organizations, philanthropy, research organizations, the private sector, and residents.
Who Is This Guide For?
We developed this guide with you—the user—in mind. It provides practical advice for people driven to boost mobility from poverty and asking, “Where do I start?” More specifically, this guide is intended for city and county government leaders who can plan, advocate for, and implement a set of policy and program changes—informed by the Mobility Metrics (explained in the next section)—that are focused on boosting mobility from poverty.
