WHAT DOES INEQUALITY LOOK LIKE IN TUCSON TODAY?

Each of us has interest and expertise in particular economic and social challenges facing our region. In order to build a broad-based, collaborative agenda for change, we need to understand the bigger picture, the cumulative effect of multiple pressures families in our community face today. The following data begins to paint that picture.

Poverty and Income Inequality
In Tucson, 20% of residents lived below the federal poverty level in 2005, up from 15% in 2000 and well above the state average (in 2003) of 14%. Poverty is especially pervasive among children, at 27.9% in 2005; the percentage of Tucson children under 5 years old living in poverty increased 5% between 2003 and 2005, to 34%.¹

At the statewide level, Arizona experienced the greatest increase among all states in income inequality between the early 1980s and early 2000s. But perhaps of even greater concern is the fact that the bottom fifth’s median family income increased so little, only 5.7% over a 20 year period (as compared to 18.9% nationally). That’s the “absolute worst of any state in the nation²

Earnings and Education
The payoff for graduating high school and pursuing higher education is at a historically high level in the United States. During the past thirty years, real wages of those with a high school degree or less has declined, while wages for those with college or advanced degrees has increased significantly, widening the gap.³ In 2003, the average hourly wage of high school graduates was 34% above those of high school dropouts. And college graduates earned 73% more than those with only a high school diploma.⁴

Statewide, the four-year high school graduation rate in Arizona is 75%; it is slightly higher in Pima County at 77.4%. But the statewide graduation rate for Hispanics is 64%, compared with 83% for White students. ⁵

Studies suggest that each additional year of schooling increases a person’s lifetime earnings by 7% to 8%.⁶ For the 36% of Latino students in Arizona who do not graduate from high school, the lifetime economic impact can be devastating.

Educational Attainment and Affordability
One of the best predictors of a child’s ultimate educational attainment is the educational level of their parents. “Even the difference of an extra year of high school, and even for only one parent, makes a child more likely to finish high school and less likely to repeat a grade along the way.” ⁷

In Arizona, young adults (ages 18-24) from low-income families are about two-thirds as likely as those from high-income families to earn a high school credential and about half as likely to attend college.⁸

The inequity has a racial component as well. Arizona whites ages 18-24 are twice as likely as non-whites to be enrolled in college. And in fact, “If all ethnic groups had the same educational attainment and earnings as whites, total personal income in the state would be about $6.2 billion higher.”⁹

College in Arizona has become less affordable for middle- and low-income families. For those families whose income is in the lowest 40% (average family income of $19,456), the net cost to attend public four-year colleges represents 47% of total family income; the cost to attend community college represents 38% of family income. This may be in part because Arizona invests very little in need-based financial aid compared with other states.¹⁰

An estimated 8% of American high school graduates are prevented from attending college by financial constraints.¹¹ This means that in Pima County every year, approximately 700 high school seniors who are qualified for college do not have the chance to attend.

Youth Crime
In Tucson, while crime overall has declined, gang violence is on the rise. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of gang-related homicides doubled, from 10 to 21 killings.¹² Drug crime has also increased significantly, rising by about 45% between 1994 and 2005.¹³ Tucson has seen these increases despite the fact that the dropout rate in the city has declined since the mid-1990s. Nonetheless, the link between education and crime is clear; in Arizona in 2001, 48.3% of prison inmates had not graduated from high school, and only 34% had received a GED.¹⁴

Early Childhood Education More than half of Arizona children younger than age 6 live with a single, working parent or two working parents. We know that the early experiences of young children have tremendous developmental impacts that will directly affect their chances of school success. Yet high-quality child care is unaffordable for many families. In 2000, the cost of full-time care ranged from $3,600 to $7,000 per year in Arizona.¹⁵

At the same time, childcare workers and early childhood educators also struggle to make ends meet. In 2004, the median salary for child care and preschool teachers in Arizona was less than $9 an hour.¹⁶

Health Care
Arizona ranks 49th in the nation in the number of nurses per 100,000 people.¹⁷ In acute care settings, the Arizona ratio is 1.9 registered nurses per 1,000 people, while the national average is 3.3 nurses per thousand. This translated to an estimated shortage of 8,000 nurses in 2005.¹⁸

High quality job training programs are one way to meet this need. JobPath has graduated 529 students, with 275 of them completing programs in allied healthcare. For nursing students, average hourly wages jumped from $9.43 before training to $22.82 after training.¹⁹

Housing Affordability
In Tucson in 2006, the hourly wage needed to buy a median-priced home ($211,502) was $30.69. The average hourly wage of a police officer was $23.11 and of a teacher was only $18.87. The hourly wage needed to rent a two-bedroom apartment in the county was $14.35, while the average hourly wage for retail sales workers in Pima County was only $9.72.²⁰

Debt
In some parts of Tucson, access to reliable financial institutions is limited. In wards 1 and 5, there are more check cashing, payday loan, and car title loan companies than banks and credit unions. In 2002, there were 1,616 foreclosures of homes in the city, with a total approximate value of $147 million. Almost a third of those foreclosures were in Ward 5, on the south side of Tucson.²¹

Moving Forward
The numbers presented here do not explain the causes of Tucson’s growing inequality, nor do they capture the daily impact of economic insecurity on people’s lives. They also do not describe the many potentially successful efforts to improve opportunities in our community. But they do provide a starting point for understanding the scope of inequality in Tucson and a basis for questioning our current reality so that we can begin to effect change.

Notes

1 U.S. Census 2000 and American Community Survey 2005.
2 Wiggins, Geoffrey S., Erika Green, and Marshall A. Worden. 2006. “Growth and the Housing Affordability Gap” in Arizona’s Rapid Growth and Development: Natural Resources and Infrastructure. 2006 Arizona Town Hall.
3 Krueger, Alan. 2003. “Inequality, Too Much of a Good Thing.” In Heckman, James J. and Alan B. Krueger, Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
4 Friedman, Benjamin M. 2005. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. New York: Vintage Books.
5 Arizona Department of Education
6 Friedman, 2005.
7 Friedman, 2005. Oreopoulos, Philip, Marianne E. Page, and Ann Huff Stevens. 2004. “Does Human Capital Transfer from Parent to Child? The Intergenerational Effects of Compulsory Schooling.” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 10164.
8 Measuring Up: The National State Report Card on Higher Education. 2006. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
9 Measuring Up. 2006, p.11
10 Measuring Up. 2006.
11 Friedman 2005.
12 “Intra-gang Violence Cited as Two Teens Die.” Arizona Daily Star. December 24, 2006.
13 Tucson Police Department
14 Making Connections: Facing the Dropout Crisis in Arizona. 2003. Voices for Education.
15 Growing Arizona: A Report by the Arizona School Readiness Task Force. 2002. Children’s Action Alliance.
16 Compensation and Credentials: A Survey of Arizona’s Early Education Workforce. July, 2005. State Board on School Readiness, Governor’s Office of Children, Youth and Families; Association for Supportive Child Care; Children’s Action Alliance.
17 The United States Health Workforce Profile 2006. Albany: New York Center for Health Workforce Studies.
18 Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.
19 JobPath 2006
20 Arizona Department of Housing 2006. This assumes that 30% of income is allocated to housing.
21 City of Tucson Poverty and Urban Stress. 2007. City of Tucson, Ward 5.