On Poverty, Edwards Faces Old Hurdles

By the time Edwards left the center in December to launch his campaign, he and his 2008 policy director, former Senate aide James Kvaal, had assembled his platform, with informal advice from his 2004 policy director, Robert Gordon, now an adviser to the New York City schools, and several experts, including Bruce Katz, director of metropolitan policy at Brookings.

The advisers say the platform accepts the premise of welfare reform but goes beyond it to argue that society owes a decent existence to those who do work. "Welfare reform was about telling everyone they need to work," Katz said. "What it didn't do is provide everyone with the means to succeed."

Besides expanding the earned-income tax credit, Edwards would strengthen labor laws and create 1 million publicly subsidized "steppingstone jobs" that would fill "community needs," pay the minimum wage and last up to 12 months. To help the poor build assets, he would create "work bonds," a tax credit that would match wages to $500 per year and be deposited into a savings account. His universal health-care plan would help poor people not covered by Medicaid.

Poverty experts say the proposals are vulnerable to some of the same criticisms leveled against past Democratic programs. They are expensive, with Edwards's health-care plan alone estimated to cost up to $120 billion a year. They do not challenge liberal orthodoxies by, for instance, exploring private-school vouchers, even though supporters of that idea say it is justified by the same logic as Edwards's housing voucher plan: giving poor families a choice.

The platform is also short of proposals that directly address the social problems, such as broken families, invoked by conservatives. Edwards mentions these problems on the trail but said he is not offering policy prescriptions because he thinks there is little Washington can do in this regard. At a symposium he hosted in November 2005, Edwards acknowledged some discomfort in broaching such issues: "In poor inner-city areas . . . the last thing they want to hear is an affluent white politician telling them what they are supposed to do."

Dispersing Poverty

Edwards is more willing to enter sensitive ground with his plan to break up concentrations of the poor, an idea with a long history in some schools of anti-poverty thought. "America has turned a blind eye to the extraordinary economic and racial segregation that still exists in this country, particularly in cities," he said. "We have to confront the issue head on."

Housing experts say there is a good case to be made for expanding vouchers, which give people more choice in where to live and are by some calculations less costly than public housing. There are now 2.1 million housing vouchers and 1.3 million public housing units. Three of four families eligible for housing assistance receive none.

But there is extensive evidence that it is going too far to expect that replacing public housing projects with a million new vouchers will alleviate poverty. In 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, under which 1,820 families living in public housing in five cities were given housing vouchers that they were required to use in low-poverty neighborhoods.

The results startled researchers. The families who moved reported improved health, and girls in the families fared better overall. But to researchers' surprise, boys in the families fared worse than those who remained in public housing, getting into more trouble with the law and feeling out of place.

Most notably, the families did not fare better economically, nor did their children's school performance improve. Among other reasons, many families did not move very far from their old homes, partly because of a shortage of affordable housing in better areas, while others reported missing the contacts they had used in their old neighborhoods to find jobs.

"In terms of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty, it's not a magic bullet," said Greg Duncan, a Northwestern University economist. Duncan brought up the findings at Edwards's November 2005 symposium; according to a transcript, no one responded.

Edwards said that he did not recall any mention of the findings but that in any case, he still thinks dispersing poor families is a cure for poverty. "I do think over time it will have a salutary effect," he said.

For some who study poverty, the question is not so much what Edwards is proposing, but whether, for all his focus on the problem, he is the candidate best suited to effect change. Edwards has become late-night comedy fodder for his new 28,000-square-foot mansion and the $400 haircuts his campaign paid for.

Kathryn Edin, a Harvard sociologist, said that while she admires Edwards, she is supporting Obama because his stint as a community organizer two decades ago in Chicago indicated a "deep set of personal commitments" to the poor.

Edwards said it is fair to ask how his call for different classes to live together can be reconciled with his family's decision to build a house that sits on 102 acres and is invisible from the road. The answer, he said, is that the estate is surrounded by farmhouses and smaller homes. "The neighborhood is very diverse racially, very diverse economically," he said.

But the larger insinuation that he is not credible on the subject riles Edwards, who notes that many rich people throughout history have helped the poor. "If you go from nothing to being extraordinarily successful and you don't try to do things to help those who have been less successful than yourself," he said, "then all you do is care about is yourself."