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Chapter 9 Place, Race, and Access to the Safety Net Scott W. Allard T his volume and other research show the clear connections between place, racial segregation, and concentrated poverty in urban and rural communities . Living in impoverished neighborhoods isolated from job opportunities, good schools, and quality housing is associated with negative education, employment , and health outcomes, particularly for racial minorities. To reduce segregation and the isolation of poor populations from opportunity, government housing and redevelopment programs often seek to expand affordable housing options, increase the mobility of poor families to better neighborhoods, and generate job growth within high-poverty communities. Typically overlooked, however, is the relationship between place, race, and the agencies that administer programs intended to alleviate poverty among nondisabled working-age populations. We assume that the delivery of other antipoverty or safety net programs is targeted, like housing and community development policies, at high-poverty neighborhoods or communities. This is due in part to the poverty literature’s focus on public cash assistance programs such as food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare cash assistance , and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that are perceived to be available regardless of where one lives. Because cash assistance can be delivered directly to recipients through the mail or electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards, we expect that type of assistance to be well matched to neighborhoods where needs are greatest. If we broaden our view of antipoverty assistance to include social service programs that seek to promote work activity and greater personal well being among working-age adults through job training, adult education, child care, emergency material assistance, and substance abuse or mental health treatment, these assumptions do not necessarily hold. These types of social services have become central components of safety net assistance for low-income families over the past 232 / four decades. But where each year welfare cash assistance, food stamps, and the EITC receive about $80 billion in funding, we likely allocate at least $150 billion in public and private funding to social service programs broadly defined. Unlike cash assistance programs, many social services cannot be delivered directly to an individual at home. Instead, clients typically visit a service agency, quite possibly several times. As a result, social service programs are fundamentally local and vary more widely by place than we tend to realize. Poor persons who do not live nearby relevant providers may either not know about available services or find it difficult to access programs because of the commutes between home, child care, work, and providers’ offices. For the poor living far from social service programs, inadequate access to providers is tantamount to receiving no aid. We should be particularly concerned about whether different race groups in urban and rural areas have spatial access to social service programs. In part this is because racial minorities are more likely to live in impoverished neighborhoods isolated from other types of opportunity and have faced historical discrimination in accessing safety net programs. Evidence that areas with large proportions of racial minorities have little access to services would indicate that programs intended to reduce poverty may in fact reinforce racial disparities in access to economic opportunity. Moreover, recent trends in immigration and shifts in the geography of poverty suggest that poor minorities, particularly Hispanic and Asian populations, are not settling primarily in central city areas as they may have done in the past (see Stoll, chapter 8, this volume). As a result, we should consider whether there are race group differences in access to service agencies across both urban and rural communities. Yet few studies of race, poverty, and social policy examine the spatial context of social service provision in our communities today. To address this gap in the literature , I review how place matters to safety net programs and compare spatial variation in access to social services in urban and rural communities by neighborhood racial composition. Specifically, I use information about the location of social service providers contained in the Multi-City Survey of Social Service Providers (MSSSP) and the Rural Survey of Social Service Providers (RSSSP) to examine the spatial distribution of service providers in several different communities with large concentrations of poor minorities (Allard 2006a, 2006b). I find evidence of less access to social service providers across predominately poor and minority neighborhoods than across less poor or predominately white ones. Such findings should both inform future research exploring race, place, and poverty, and generate policy implications for a safety net that emphasizes social service...

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