State the Problem You Selected. Provide a succinct statement that articulates what you currently know about the problem, based on what you learned from your peers, your Instru

Mixing It Up: Reframing Neighborhood Socioeconomic Diversity

October 2016 A FrameWorks MessageMemo

Sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Drew Volmert, PhD, Director of Research

Moira O’Neil, PhD, Director of Research Interpretation and Application

Nat Kendall-Taylor, PhD, Chief Executive Officer

Julie Sweetland, PhD, Vice President for Strategy and Innovation1

©FrameWorks Institute 2016

Table of Contents

………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Introduction 3

………………………………………………………………………………………….Gaps in Understanding 6

……………………………………………………………….A Core Story of Socioeconomic Mixing 13

………………………………………………………………………………………………Putting It Together 40

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Conclusion 42

…………………………………………………………………………About the FrameWorks Institute 43

……………………………………………………………………………………Appendix A: Expert Story 44

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Endnotes 51

Mixing it Up: Reframing Neighborhood Socioeconomic Diversity

Introduction

In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy defended his economic policies with a now-famous seafaring metaphor: "a rising tide lifts all boats." Some two decades later, Ronald Reagan appropriated the metaphor to build support for the supply-side economics theory that low tax rates spur the wealthy to invest their capital, which creates jobs and lowers prices on consumer goods and thus ultimately benefits the middle and working classes. He also used another metaphor—the “trickle- down” effect—to build support for “Reaganomics.” The evidence shows that as a result of these conservative economic policies, economic inequality is widening, class segregation is intensifying, and the effects have far-reaching implications for people across society.

The evidence also shows that when affluent people are geographically isolated, people in lower economic strata lose out. Wealthier communities with large tax bases fund higher-quality schools and better health care services—but these investments do not spill over to other, less affluent communities. In addition, people who live in segregated income groups are less likely to interact and socialize with people in other income groups. In turn, as sociologists Sean Reardon and Kendra Bischoff have demonstrated, affluent people who live in isolation have less empathy for people who struggle economically and are more willing to support policies that disproportionately punish the poor.2 In addition to these impacts on lower-income people, the effects of economic segregation reverberate across society and diminish the quality of life for everyone.

Advocates for socioeconomic mixing—the comprehensive integration of social groups and classes in the economic life of a given location—have the research on their side, but they still face significant communications challenges. FrameWorks researchers found that the American public is not aware of the harmful effect that economic segregation has on society and has difficulty thinking about socioeconomic mixing. When they consider the processes that lead to mixed- income communities, they tend to equate them with “gentrification.” This is a problematic term because of its associations with the displacement of existing community members, who are, more often than not, people of color. These dominant understandings obscure the importance and collective benefits of socioeconomic mixing and the fact that it can be carried out responsibly— and equitably—in ways that do not marginalize disadvantaged groups.

The first part of this MessageMemo lays out these and other communications challenges in detail. It shows that the US public views economic segregation as a normal, natural phenomenon; does not understand its negative impact on individuals, communities, and society as a whole; and has little information about how policymakers or others can address it responsibly and equitably.

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The second part of the report offers a framing strategy for building support for the policies that foster a more sensible, equitable approach to socioeconomic mixing. The strategy involves an overarching narrative that makes the harms of economic segregation visible, clearly explains the process of fostering socioeconomic diversity, and foregrounds its shared benefits. FrameWorks refers to this type of “explanatory narrative” as a core story. A core story provides a shared communications foundation replete with tested, reliable tools that advocates can use to coalesce around a common language and craft coordinated messages about socioeconomic diversity.

Both the description of the communications landscape and the prescribed strategy for navigating to higher ground are based on a Strategic Frame Analysis®, an investigation that combines theory and methods from different social science disciplines to arrive at reliable, research-based recommendations for reframing a social issue. Figure 1 describes the base of research that underlies the recommended narrative.

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Figure 1: The Research Base

What communications research does a field need to reframe an issue?

WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH ON ECONOMIC INTEGRATION SAY? To discern and distill expert consensus on economic integration, FrameWorks conducted expert interviews in September and October 2015 with nine leading researchers in the field of economic integration. This data was supplemented by a review of relevant academic and advocacy literature and was refined during a series of feedback sessions with leaders in the field.

HOW DOES THE PUBLIC THINK? To document the cultural models that Americans draw on to make sense of topics like economic success and mobility, inequality, and residential integration and segregation by race and class, FrameWorks conducted in-depth interviews with members of the public and analyzed the resulting transcripts to identify the implicit, shared understandings and assumptions that structured public opinion. Twenty interviews were conducted in San Jose, Nashville, St. Paul, and Philadelphia in July and August of 2015.

WHAT FRAMES CAN SHIFT THINKING? To systematically identify effective ways of talking about socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods and the policies that create them, FrameWorks researchers developed alternative messages and tested them with ordinary Americans. Two primary methods were used to explore, winnow, and refine possible reframes:

• On-the-street interviews involve rapid, face-to-face testing of frame elements for their ability to prompt productive and robust understandings of a topic. Two sets of interviews—a total of 85—were conducted in 2015 and 2016.

• A series of experimental surveys, involving a representative sample of 6,000 respondents, were conducted to test the effects of exposure to a variety of frames on public understanding, attitudes, and support for programs and policies.

All told, more than 6,100 people from across the United States were included in this research.

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Gaps in Understanding

Before designing communications on a complex social issue, it is helpful to anticipate how and why those communications might go awry. A systematic analysis of where public thinking differs from expert consensus is an incredibly informative tool, as it can point to strategic priorities for reframing. Bridging the gaps creates a more informed citizenry that is more equipped to participate productively in public conversations and more likely to work toward solutions.

The American public understands inequality and socioeconomic mixing differently from experts on the issue. In this section, we enumerate these gaps, which involve different understandings of the causes, consequences, and policy corollaries of economic segregation. (For a fuller exposition of the expert view, see Appendix A.)

Why aren’t people economically mobile? Individual effort and “culture” vs. structures and systems

Public thinking about economic success and mobility is dominated by Individualism, a model that attributes economic success, struggle, and failure to personal choice and willpower. When thinking with this model, the public assumes that anyone who has sufficient drive, ambition, self- discipline, and will can accumulate wealth in this country. By the same reasoning, economic failure is attributed to poor choices and lack of effort. The public draws on Individualism to explain why poor urban neighborhoods are, in fact, poor: because the people who live there have made, and continue to make, bad choices.

A related, but more specific, model that derives from Individualism is a model of Inner City Pathology. This pattern of thinking blends faulty assumptions about willpower with toxic deficit- based assumptions about race to yield a distinctive diagnosis of low-income Black urban communities as places saturated with poor individual choices and “bad values.” In this model, inner city “ghettos” are assumed to be the locus of a distinctive form of poverty, one that demonstrates the inferior moral character of poor Black people, who fail to take education seriously or work hard at legitimate jobs, choices that ensure a continued state of poverty.3 Surrounded by these poor examples and conditions, more and more Black people get “stuck” in this culture of poverty. Reasoning this way, Americans arrive quickly at fatalistic attitudes about addressing poverty in urban communities. By assigning responsibility for poverty to individuals, this pattern also saps public concern for people who live in economically segregated neighborhoods, as they are assumed to be responsible for the consequences of their own decisions.

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These individualistic modes of thinking contrast starkly with the view of experts, who highlight the role of institutional racism and legal systems in producing differential levels of mobility and economic inequality in the United States. Experts stress institutionalized racism in our legal and economic systems, explaining how structural conditions and policies marginalize low-income Black people and have resulted in concentrated areas of urban poverty. For experts, economic and racial disparities are not the exclusive product of differences in individuals’ drive, character, or values, but rather are primarily driven by systemic and structural factors. Experts and the public thus hold fundamentally different top-of-mind understandings about economic inequality, particularly where agency and power are located. However, there is evidence that this wide gap can be bridged, or perhaps circumnavigated. While public thinking is dominated by individualistic models, there are more ecological ways of thinking that are available and that people can use to think about economic inequality. These more ecological ways of thinking are thin and recessive—that is, people are unlikely to spontaneously draw on these models but can and will if prompted to do so.

The first of these more ecological ways of thinking is the Place Matters model. When thinking with this model, Americans can easily appreciate that physical surroundings shape economic prospects, as some communities have greater access to resources than others. In particular, the public understands that children who grow up in affluent communities have opportunities and advantages that are absent for children in lower-class communities. Another ecological cultural model involves a view of the economy as a system that is unfairly biased in favor of upper-income people—what might be called the System is Rigged model. When drawing upon this way of thinking, people are open to seeing that inequality and lack of economic mobility are the result of a system that makes it easier for some to get ahead than others. Yet, as a recessive model, System Is Rigged thinking lacks depth and detail. People find it difficult to offer examples that demonstrate exactly how the system is set up to produce unequal outcomes. These more ecological ways of thinking—the Place Matters and the System Is Rigged models— generally align with experts’ focus on systems, structures, and the role of place in shaping outcomes, and thus provide a useful starting point for communications. They do have limitations. People tend to apply the Place Matters model primarily to children, and they have a narrow understanding of the mechanisms by which environments shape economic outcomes. In addition, the System Is Rigged model can lead to a powerful sense of fatalism—that nothing can be done to fix systems, and therefore poverty and economic inequality are largely insolvable problems. Communicators must be careful to counter this fatalistic part of the model by providing clear explanations of how policies can work to reduce economic inequality and

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improve outcomes. Despite these limitations, expanding upon these more productive recessive models is the key to overcoming gaps in understanding around the sources of economic inequality and immobility. Why is there economic segregation? Natural order of things vs. product of policies One of the most troubling findings from our research is that the American public sees inequality and economic segregation as an unchangeable status quo. This conclusion results from a set of interrelated assumptions. The public often understands economic inequality as a normal, expected, and perhaps even desirable aspect of a free market economy. Differential access to goods and services is a defining characteristic of the economic system, and is thus immutable. We call this the Natural Order model. A related model focuses on the “natural” state of individual choices, a Consumerism model that involves assumptions about voluntary, personal choices about how to allocate individual resources. In this model, economic and racial segregation are not imposed but freely chosen. The public assumes that residential patterns are driven by two factors in consumer behavior: what people can afford and what people “like.” People naturally choose the “best neighborhood they can afford,” which leads to economic sorting. And, according to this line of thinking, people also want to live near people who are like themselves. In other words, people choose to cluster with other people of their own class and race. Both the Natural Order and the Consumerism cultural models obscure the role of policy in producing economic and racial segregation in the United States. Contrary to public assumptions, experts argue that economic and racial segregation are the result of policies instituted at federal, state, and local levels. These policies shape systems that segregate people by residence and income and, in turn, predetermine economic mobility. These perspectives are decidedly difficult for the public to consider when their thinking is shaped by the Natural Order and Free Choice models. What is socioeconomic mixing? Cognitive hole vs. key concept

The idea of encouraging socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods is largely absent from public thinking: It is a “cognitive hole” which, empty of a robust concept, is filled in with miscellaneous detritus of discourse. In this case, the public relies on its awareness of different ways that socioeconomic mixing has happened in America, though they are unlikely to consider socioeconomic diversity as the end goal of these routes. These include gentrification, or the movement of higher- and middle-income people into low-income neighborhoods, and affordable housing programs, or policies that enable low-income people to move into more affluent areas. Both routes are, in the public mind, fraught with negative associations. People equate

Mixing it Up: Reframing Neighborhood Socioeconomic Diversity 8

“gentrification” with the disruption of low-income communities and the displacement of their former residents. In the public definition of gentrification, affluent people are the “winners” and low-income people are the “losers.” On the other hand, they assume that affordable housing programs only benefit the low-income residents who are eligible for spots in price-controlled developments or who receive other forms of subsidies. People reason that the surrounding, presumably affluent, neighborhood is negatively impacted, expressing worries that the influx of low-income residents lowers the quality of life and creates social conflict. While there are important differences between these two routes to economically diverse neighborhoods, there is a common thread in the way Americans think about them: In neither case are mixed neighborhoods understood to be a worthy goal in their own right. People recognize that segregation exists along socioeconomic lines but don’t consider it a problem. The problem emerges only when market pressures or public policy try to change pre-existing residential patterns.

Again, on this point, there are important differences in thinking between the public and experts. Experts argue that socioeconomic mixing—comprehensive integration of economic life in a given location across socioeconomic class—is critical for ensuring widespread economic opportunity and mobility. For the public, this concept is almost wholly foreign.4 Experts stress that, if handled with the right policies, the movement of affluent residents into low-income communities need not lead to displacement and, in fact, can produce desirable social, civic, and economic shifts that benefit everyone. The public, however, might not know much about policies that move rich and poor closer together, but based on their associations with gentrification and affordable housing programs, assumes that such efforts won’t go well.

To bridge this gap, advocates for socioeconomic mixing must find ways to build understanding of what they mean by socioeconomic mixing. A communications strategy should foreground the explanation of socioeconomically mixed communities as places where people of different wealth and income levels interact regularly in everyday life, as they work, study, worship, shop, and play in common spaces.

What are the potential impacts of socioeconomic mixing? Separate fates vs. shared benefits

Because of the way the public thinks—and doesn’t think—about socioeconomic diversity in residential areas, many of the possible benefits of socioeconomic mixing are obscured. The public can point to specific groups that stand to gain in certain scenarios, but they are more apt to reason from a Separate Fates model that holds that the circumstances, experiences, and trajectories of the “haves” and “have-nots” are distinct and disconnected. What affects one group is of little consequence to the other, in this pattern of thinking.

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FrameWorks researchers pushed ordinary Americans to think about the potential benefits of socioeconomic mixing—only to find that, even with prompting, the public struggled to understand why socioeconomic mixing would be valuable across social groups or to society as a whole. The two benefits that the public could see further illustrated the underlying Separate Fates modeling of lower- and upper-income groups as culturally distinct, subject to very different effects from similar experiences. One way that the public thought about the potential benefits of socioeconomic mixing was Inspiration, or the thinking that regular interaction with affluent neighbors would motivate poor or working-class people to work harder in order to gain a similar quality of life. The second benefit of socioeconomic mixing in the public mind, the Spice of Life, was modeled as accruing to more affluent members of a diverse community. This model involved the thinking that interactions with people of different backgrounds afforded more interest and texture to the lifestyles of affluent people.

When reasoning from a Separate Fates model, the public is unlikely to see how the negative consequences of economic segregation might be felt beyond those isolated neighborhoods. They are even less likely to consider that more integrated, more equitable arrangements might offer collective benefits.

These patterns of public thinking differ substantially from the views of those who have studied outcomes associated with socioeconomically diverse residential areas. In the experts’ telling, socioeconomic mixing both enhances economic mobility for lower-income people and has civic benefits for the entire community. Experts point out that when lower-income people live near the affluent, they have greater access to the resources and services that have been built up over time through the political clout and buying power of the affluent. Socioeconomic mixing increases economic mobility not through increased motivation but through enhanced access to the infrastructure that supports economic participation, such as better schools, libraries, parks, retail options, public safety, and transportation.

Experts further assert that when residential areas include a diverse mix of income levels, there are shared benefits that accrue to the collective. They note that the civic body of a democracy is stronger when social cohesion and cooperation are present and that economically mixed communities are a means of achieving this. Socioeconomic mixing brings opportunities for engagement and collaboration across class lines, which builds the community cohesion and cooperation necessary to solve shared problems. Finally, experts point out that the costs of economic segregation are borne not only by the individuals and families who live in communities with lacking or low-quality infrastructure but also by society at large, in the form of a weaker economy and a more fragile, fractious democracy.

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To bridge this gap, advocates for socioeconomic mixing must find effective ways to explain how this approach affects mobility (by shifting access to resources and opportunities), and why this approach is worthy of consideration (because it offers benefits that are quintessentially shared: namely, stronger communities, a stronger economy, and a stronger society).

What should be done to promote socioeconomic mixing? Nothing vs. changes to public policy

Because the public lacks an understanding of what socioeconomic mixing involves and what collective benefits might be realized by it, they have little reason to even think about policies to actively promote socioeconomic mixing, let alone make these policies a priority. Moreover, FrameWorks research suggests that even if this topic were more salient, the public might still conclude that policy interventions were inappropriate or impossible. Dominant models of poverty will invariably shape the public’s thinking about possible solutions to economic segregation. First, ordinary Americans share an assumption that both the problem and the solution lie at the level of personal choice: Poverty is caused by poor personal choices or an individual’s lack of effort and is solved through more self-discipline, better choices, and greater effort. This Individualism model feeds into Fatalism: The public reasons that poverty is intractable because human nature is such that some people can’t or won’t change, and therefore, they remain in perpetual poverty. Together, these cultural models are likely to lead people to conclude that there are no ways to meaningfully address the existence of poor communities. The poor shall always be with us—and they have to live somewhere.

The public’s sense that there’s nothing to be done stands in sharp contrast to experts’ call for bold action. They say that the time is right to place socioeconomic mixing high on the public policy agenda, and that there are strategic ways to facilitate the conditions for socioeconomic mixing and structure residential patterns in ways that ensure everyone benefits. They propose a range of new and specific public policies related to zoning, fair housing, taxes, anchor institutions, job growth, and other areas. Together, they argue, these policies would promote socioeconomic mixing, boost upward mobility for lower-income people, and produce socially and economically vibrant communities that benefit all residents.

Given the distance between public and expert thinking about what’s to be done, it is no surprise that this topic has been a difficult one to move into the public square and onto the policy agenda. To bridge the gap on solutions, framing strategies must foster a shared understanding of the problems, build awareness of how proposed policies would work, and shift attention from selective benefits to collective benefits. Figure 2 summarizes the gaps between public and expert thinking about socioeconomic mixing.

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Figure 2: Mapping the Gaps

EXPLANATION OF ECONOMIC

MOBILITY

Systems and Structures

Individual Effort and “Culture”

CAUSES OF ECONOMIC

SEGREGATION Product of Policies

Natural Order of Things

DEFINITION OF SOCIOECONOMIC

MIXING Key Concept Cognitive Hole

POTENTIAL IMPACTS

Shared Benefits Separate Fates

SOLUTIONSPublic Policy Nothing

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A Core Story of Socioeconomic Mixing To dislodge dominant, unproductive models and open up new, more productive ways of thinking, communicators need a coherent and memorable narrative that they can share easily and disseminate widely. Given the challenges posed by public understandings of economic inequality and socioeconomic mixing, reframing these issues will require multiple tools that are integrated into a narrative strategy; no single frame element will be able to meaningfully and durably shift thinking on this complex set of issues. A successful strategy will require persistently and consistently filling the gaps in understanding with a story that sticks and can be told in flexible ways.

Figure 3 summarizes strategies communicators should use to advance the public discussion on socioeconomic mixing as well as frames they should avoid. We discuss each of these strategies in detail below.

Figure 3: Framing Strategies

DO: DON’T:

Tell a consistent story, regardless of politica

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