Where you grow up matters in an unequal economy. Here’s how.

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• Judy Woodruff:

  But first: Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, is continuing to chronicle some of the problems with inequality across the country.

  Tonight, he looks at the possibility of moving up the economic ladder by moving out to other communities.

  It's part of his weekly series, Making Sense.

• Kristen Hopper:

  I want better for my family.

• Paul Solman:

  Kristen Hopper expressing the economic motto of America even before the states united.

  So, you want your kids to do better than you have done?

• Kristen Hopper:

  A hundred percent.

• Paul Solman:

  The 35-year-old mother of four has gone the extra miles to make that happen. With help from the Interfaith Council for Action, a housing nonprofit, she's uprooted her family from hardscrabble Yonkers, New York, where she herself grew up, and has in effect emigrated a mere 20 miles north, but in some respects a world away, to Ossining, New York.

  Ossining may be home to Sing Sing Prison, where criminals are still sent up the river from New York City, but this is suburbia, a place with far better prospects for 2-year-old twins Robert and Juliet (ph), 10-year-old Josie, 14-year-old Gio.

• Kristen Hopper:

  The last place that I lived, it wasn't safe for my kids to walk around in. There was a shoot-out. They have all kinds of gangs. I know that, if I stayed there, my kids would be in the streets too.

• Paul Solman:

  But instead of the streets, Gio is in after-school clubs, pre-law, pre-business and The Ossining High School Current.

• Giovanni Rosado:

  I want to become a lawyer. And I'm trying to work on that.

• Paul Solman:

  So that you can do better economically?

• Giovanni Rosado:

  Yes. Yes.

• Paul Solman:

  How much better is it for you and for the kids…

• Robert Brunner:

  Oh my God.

• Paul Solman:

  … to be living…

• Robert Brunner:

  It's amazing.

• Paul Solman:

  Hopper's fiance, Robert Brunner.

• Robert Brunner:

  The safety is 1,000 times different than it is in a hood area. And to fit in, in those places, you have to be rough and tough, and it's a totally different child. It changes the child.

• Paul Solman:

  As it changed Brunner, who did and dealt drugs, like the hallucinogen PCP, angel dust.

• Robert Brunner:

  It's embalming fluid and jet propellant. That's the mix of it. I used to sell it. I used to do all that crap. Craziness.

• Paul Solman:

  The craziness climaxed when he crashed his car while high, was in a coma for 18 months.

• Robert Brunner:

  My father — like, when the doctor say, you know, your son has no brain activity, he's — he won't even be able to function, so then they pull the plug on me. They basically pull it out to see if you can breath on your own. And then, if you do, you're good. And if you don't, you're done.

• Paul Solman:

  Do you think that a kid as smart as Gio is, would he have been vulnerable to taking angel dust?

• Robert Brunner:

  I think, if the crowd is doing it, I think he would do it. Peer pressure isn't easy, you know?

• Paul Solman:

  And thus the move upriver, different peers, different pressures. Just ask Gio and Josie.

• Giovanni Rosado:

  The people down in Yonkers, they are very mean, in a way.

• Paul Solman:

  Mean?

• Giovanni Rosado:

  Yes. They, like, get angry a lot and they like to pick on kids, and I didn't really enjoy that.

• Josephina Gravenese:

  And, in Ossining, there's like kids who are like so nice to you. When it was my first day, the kids were asking me like, do you want to play and stuff? It's just not like Yonkers at all.

• Paul Solman:

  But it could be that the people in Yonkers are as mean as they are, to use your word, because they don't see much of a future for themselves there.

• Giovanni Rosado:

  That's true.

• Paul Solman:

  Where people here do see a future for themselves.

• Giovanni Rosado:

  Yes.

• Paul Solman:

  Which is their mom's whole point.

• Kristen Hopper:

  I want to show them that in order to be able to live well, and not live paycheck to paycheck, not have to be on social services, not that it's a bad thing — and I'm grateful for all the help that I have, but I definitely want them to do better than me.

• Paul Solman:

  Now, some might say that shouldn't be hard in this case, but here's the stark fact that prompted our trip to Westchester: The odds no longer favor American kids doing better than their parents.

• Raj Chetty:

  It's basically a coin flip at this point.

• Nathaniel Hendren:

  Yes, it's just a remarkable decline in our country in terms of the fraction of our kids earning more than their parents.

• Paul Solman:

  Economists Raj Chetty and Nat Hendren study economic inequality, growing in America for decades, as you have so often heard. But inequality itself might not be so bad if we all had a fair shot at the platinum ring.

• Problem is:

• Nathaniel Hendren:

  The fraction of kids earning more than their parents has fallen from above 90 percent four decades ago to about 50 percent today.

• Paul Solman:

  And so people who are worried about this for their kids are right to worry.

• Nathaniel Hendren:

  Absolutely. It used to be that everybody could count on this, that your kids were going to grow up to earn more than you. And, today, it's not just something that's a feature of the American economy.

• Paul Solman:

  So what can a poor family with an American dream do to increase the odds of the kids moving up? Move out.

• Nathaniel Hendren:

  We see that in places where kids of different economic backgrounds are mixing in the same environment, those tend to be places where kids from low-income backgrounds rise up further in the income distribution.

• Paul Solman:

  Kind of like Ossining, where a plaque commemorates Alexis de Tocqueville's visit almost 200 years ago. He wrote: "When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention."

• Kristen Hopper:

  You have some really wealthy people. You have some people in poverty. It's kind of balanced.

• Paul Solman:

  And that helps your kids?

• Kristen Hopper:

  Yes, I want them to understand that there is hard life, that there's good life.

• Paul Solman:

  So they can see the good life, and they see it's attainable you mean?

• Kristen Hopper:

  Yes. Of course.

  Of course, because the reverse is also true.

• Raj Chetty:

  Places that are more segregated by race or by income tend to have lower levels of upward mobility.

• Paul Solman:

  Consider inner-city Baltimore, which we visited two years ago, when violence erupted following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody. According to these young ministers-in-training, the near-absence of upward mobility fueled the protesters' anger.

• Man:

  People aren't feeling like they can succeed in life or get above.

• Man:

  It's like we're all living in this dump or this war zone.

• Man:

  Living in the dilapidated areas which they live in, they feel like they're not loved. They feel like they're not cared for.

• Raj Chetty:

  If you think about what's gone on in Baltimore, it's a place of tremendous concentrated poverty.

• Paul Solman:

  Chetty and Hendren have looked closely at Baltimore, reanalyzing data from a mid-1990s experiment in which the federal government gave poor families housing vouchers to move to better neighborhoods. Twenty years later:

• Raj Chetty:

  The kids who moved at young ages are dramatically better as adults. They're earning 30 percent more. They're 27 percent more likely to go to college, something like 30 percent less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, relative to the kids who stayed in the high-poverty public housing projects.

  And so there's clear scientific evidence that you can dramatically change kids' outcomes just based on where they grow up.

• Paul Solman:

  What does it say on your arm?

• Destiny Turturiello:

  "Only the strong survive," in Chinese.

• Paul Solman:

  But back in Yonkers, 17-year-old Destiny Turturiello, a family friend of Kristen Hopper's from the old neighborhood, can't get out. A minor with no legal guardian, she's even having trouble getting back into school, having dropped out when kids bullied her for doing her homework during lunch. She used to give as good as she got.

• Destiny Turturiello:

  If you look at me, just like how you're looking at me now…

• Paul Solman:

  Yes?

• Destiny Turturiello:

  … I might just fight you two years ago.

• Paul Solman:

  You would fight me? What do you mean?

• Destiny Turturiello:

  I would just be like, what are you staring at? Is there a problem? And then I would have hit you.

  And then I would have went about my day, because I feel like I just took my anger out on you.

• Paul Solman:

  She's learned to manage her anger, but she's still in Yonkers, which has deep pockets of poverty not far from upscale, affluent areas.

• Destiny Turturiello:

  What am I doing with my life? I'm not doing anything productive. What am I going to be later on in life? Am I going to be something? If I could change on living in Yonkers, I would do it 100 percent.

• Paul Solman:

  But Turturiello, like millions of other Americans, can't afford to move to a better community. Kristen Hopper only managed with help from benefactors. But finances weren't the only factor.

• Kristen Hopper:

  It was hard for me to disconnect from friends. Like, what am I going to do if I have nobody you know? And when I actually did it, many people were shocked.

• Paul Solman:

  Shocked, she says, and resentful.

  Is the resentment similar to the resentment that so many Americans feel towards people who are just doing much better that they're doing in this economy?

• Kristen Hopper:

  I have felt that resentment hard.

• Paul Solman:

  The status distinction.

• Kristen Hopper:

  Yes. I did. I did.

• Paul Solman:

  Location, location, location, an old saw in real estate, but one with poignant new pertinence in today's increasingly immobile economy.

  For the PBS NewsHour, this is economics correspondent Paul Solman, reporting from Westchester, New York.