Area officials should seek definitive stats on poverty

Why would anyone in the Mahoning Valley challenge a study that shows poverty in the Youngstown-Warren area experiencing one of the largest declines in the nation? Because the number of poor is one of the main factors used by the federal government for allocating dollars for various social programs.
Local officials who deal with such statistics on a daily basis contend that The Brookings Institution, which conducted the poverty study, misinterpreted the 1990 and 2000 census data. But since the study is getting such wide publicity, we would urge local governments to get a definitive profile of poverty in the Mahoning Valley. An obvious source for this information would be the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers many of the programs that are important to Youngstown and Warren.
Tom Finnerty, associate director of Youngstown State University's Center for Urban and Regional Studies, doesn't mince words in reacting to the conclusions drawn by Brookings. "They didn't have a clue as to how to interpret census data," he says. "We would have flunked if we have turned in something like this."
That may well be, but the institution has a national reputation, and with its liberal bent isn't given to painting rosy pictures, especially when it comes to social issues. Yet, its study shows that overall, the Youngstown-Warren area had the 21st largest decline in poverty in the nation, a 15.8 drop from the 1990 census to the 2000. By race, Hispanics in the region had the fourth largest decline in poverty, 45.6 percent, in the nation, while blacks had the seventh largest, 40.5 percent.
It's the economy
And what reason does the Brookings Institution give for this decrease in poverty? Paul A. Jargowsky, the author of the report and the director of the Bruton Center for Development Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, says the excellent economy of the 1990s is largely responsible for the decline in the national concentrated poverty rate.
It is fallacious to apply a national trend to the Mahoning Valley, because it has been shown time and again that when it comes to economic recovery, Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties lag behind the rest of the state and the nation.
"Is poverty [in the Valley] decreasing? Not by any stretch of measurement that I can tell," says Jay Williams, director of Youngstown's Community Development Agency. "Poverty is shifting. It's misleading to say poverty has decreased."
The danger with the Brookings Institution study is that the findings could be embraced by the federal government and could result in Youngstown and Warren losing much-needed dollars from Washington. That's why local officials should seek an independent analysis of the study.