The Blocks Between

Ocesa Keaton, former executive director of Greater Syracuse HOPE, an anti-poverty initiative in the area, points to these numbers when concluding that race is a driving factor in the creation of opportunity in these neighborhoods.

“It’s not so much an inequality based on where you live, but an inequality based on racial lines and gender lines,” Keaton said.

Charles Pierce-El raised six children during the 1970s and ’80s on Elk Avenue on the South Side. He remembers giving his future wife a dozen roses on the floor of the Chrysler plant where they both worked. They married in 1968 and had their first daughter the next year.

“The jobs were plentiful, because we were an industrialization nation,” said Pierce-El, who grew up in a family of 12 in Syracuse’s 15th Ward, which was largely destroyed to make way for Interstate 81 in the 1960s.

But by the time his children grew up, Pierce-El said, the opportunities had dried up. Chrysler, Carrier, General Motors, and General Electric took jobs elsewhere or automated them throughout the second half of the 20th century.

“When the jobs left, people were left,” Pierce-El said. “There was no substitute for them.”

That decline in access to opportunity was felt particularly hard in Pierce-El’s neighborhood. The employment rate among adults who grew up in low-income homes in Pierce-El’s area is 12% less than the employment rate of people who grew up across the highway, according to the Opportunity Insights data.

Such a gap in access to opportunity in Syracuse results in a stark racialized income gap. Onondaga County has the seventh-largest income gap between white and Black residents in the nation when examining older industrial communities, according to the Brookings Institution. White people in the county made 92% more than Black people in 2016, Brookings found.

The author of the Brookings study, Alan Berube, writes that the industrial success of northeastern cities like Syracuse relied on Black people, but when the jobs left, Black people were systematically denied the access to jobs and housing that were afforded to white people.

Davia Moss, a nurse at Upstate Medical Hospital, grew up on Standish Drive on the East Side of the city. She remembers her neighborhood, Bradford Hills, being filled with mostly white middle-class families. The one Black family on her block was the exception, she said.

Growing up throughout the 1990s, she considered her neighborhood the nice area of the city, but there was no sign of excess wealth.

She walked to each school she went to, H.W. Smith Elementary, Levy Middle School, and Nottingham High School. She remembers thinking the other high schools in the city — Fowler, Corcoran, and Henninger — were scary places.

One time, she went to Corcoran High School for an all-county band event.

“I was shocked to see it wasn’t that scary,” Moss said.

After high school, Moss went to SU for pre-med on a scholarship. She later worked on an ambulance as she studied her way through nursing school. Her job as an emergency medical technician transformed her view of the city she has always called home.

“Before I worked in EMS, there were areas of the city I barely knew existed,” Moss said. “Even now I talk to people and they say, ‘We don’t drive down that street. That’s a terrible street.’”

Moss now lives just one street away from where she grew up, but she and her husband are in the process of moving to the suburb of Manlius.

That move from urban to suburban was the story of Taylor Arras’ third-grade year. She spent the first 10 years of her life on Westmoreland Avenue on the East Side of the city before being moved just a half-mile to the suburb of Dewitt in 1996.

Dewitt is an even higher opportunity zone compared to Syracuse’s East Side. Low-income children who grew up in the section of Dewitt that Arras moved to went on to make a median income of $38,000.

A study done by Opportunity Insights suggests that children who move into higher opportunity zones during childhood tend to benefit from that move down the line.

The existence of these high- and low-opportunity zones is connected to concentrated poverty, said Paul Jargowsky, the director of the Center for Urban Research and Education at Rutgers University. Jargowsky has researched the geographic aspect of poverty for decades. A 2015 study he wrote found that out of the top 100 metropolitan areas, Syracuse has the highest poverty concentration among Black and Latinx residents.

People in poverty who grow up in high poverty zones, where 40% of the population is impoverished, tend to struggle climbing the social ladder more than others, Jargowsky said. Concentrated poverty can result in under performing schools, degrading infrastructure, and a lack of social capital. The process is cyclical, entrapping entire areas in generational poverty.

“This is no secret,” Jargowksy said. “You can go back to the 1970s and look at studies that say this.”

The census tracts that had the least access opportunity in the Harvard study also have the highest concentration of poverty today.

In Pierce-El’s neighborhood, 45% of families were under the poverty line in 2019. Just across the city, where Arras and Moss grew up, less than 5% of people were impoverished that same year.