The Two-Income Trap (31 page)

20
Total revolving debt (which is predominantly credit card debt) increased from $64,500,000 in 1981 to $692,800,000 in 2000. SMR Research Corporation,
The New Bankruptcy Epidemic: Forecasts, Causes, and Risk Control
(Hackettstown, NJ, 2001), p. 14. Bankruptcy data calculated from data reported by Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Table F2 (total nonbusiness filings), 1980-2002.

21
Carolyn Setlow, “Home: The ‘New’ Destination,”
Point of Purchase
, July 1, 2002.

22
Today the median sale price for an existing home is more than $150,000—up 32 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from 1975. Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University,
The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2002
(Cambridge, MA, 2002),
Table A.1
, Housing Market Indicators, 1975-2001.

23
In 2001, 78.8 percent of married couples with children were homeowners. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research. U.S. Housing Market Conditions (Fourth Quarter, 2002), Table 30, Homeownership Rates by Household Type, 1983-Present. Although the data are not reported for subgroups, presumably this rate was lower for low-income families, and even higher for middle- and upper-income families. In the general population, middle-income households are 34 percent more likely than low-income households to own a home. Calculated from Joint Center for Housing Studies,
State of the Nation’s Housing,
Table A-9.

24
Patric H. Hendershott, “Are Real House Prices Likely to Decline by 47 Percent?”
Regional Science and Urban Economics
21, no. 4 (1991): 553-563. See also N. Gregory Mankiw and David N. Weil, “The Baby Boom, the Baby Bust, and the Housing Market,”
Regional Science and Urban Economics
19, no. 2 (1989): 235-258. Jonathan R. Laing, “Crumbling Castles: The Recession in Real Estate Has Ominous Implications,”
Barron’s,
December 18, 1989.

25
Updegrave, “How Are We Doing?” p. 20.

26
Joint Center for Housing Studies,
State of the Nation’s Housing,
Table A.1
.

27
The proportion of owner-occupied houses twenty-five years or older grew from 40 percent in 1975 to 59 percent in 1999. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
American Housing Survey, 1999,
Current Housing Reports, H150/99 (October 2000), Table 3-1, Introductory Characteristics—Owner Occupied Units;
American Housing Survey: 1975, General Housing Characteristics,
Current Housing Reports, H-150-75A (April 1977), Table A1, Characteristics of the Housing Inventory, 1975 and 1970.

28
Bureau of the Census,
American Housing Survey: 1975, General Housing Characteristics,
Current Housing Reports, H-150-75A, Table A1;
American Housing Survey, 1997,
Current Housing Reports, H150/97 (October 2000), Table 3-3, Size of Unit and Lot—Owner Occupied Units.

29
Bureau of the Census,
American Housing Survey: 1975, General Housing Characteristics,
Current Housing Reports, H-150-75A, Table A1;
American Housing Survey, 1999,
Current Housing Reports, H150/99, Table 3-3.

30
BLS,
Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1984
, Table 5, Composition of Consumer Unit. BLS,
Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2001
, Table 5, Composition of Consumer Unit, Average annual expenditures and characteristics . Data are mean estimated market value of owned home for “husband and wife only” consumer units. Similarly, the American Housing Survey shows that homeowners with no unmarried children (including both single and married homeowners) experienced a 20 percent increase in median home value between 1985 and 2001.
American Housing Survey for the United States in 1985
, Current Housing Reports, H-150-85 (December 1988), Table 3-22, Value by Selected Characteristics—Owner Occupied Units.
American Housing Survey for the United States: 2001
, Annual Survey (2001), Table 3-22, Value by Selected Characteristics—Owner Occupied Units.

31
BLS,
Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1984
, Table 5. BLS,
Consumer Expenditure Survey, 2001
, Table 5. Data are mean estimated market value of owned home for married couples with oldest child under age 6. We have focused on couples with young children because they are typically new entrants into the housing market and therefore feel most acutely increases in housing prices. Couples with the oldest child between age 6 and 17 also experienced a significant (though somewhat smaller) increase in average home value during this period, of 58 percent. The American Housing Survey indicates a somewhat less dramatic rise in median home values, showing that the average homeowner with two young children saw a 37 percent real increase in median home value between 1985 and 2001, compared with a 20 percent increase for homeowners without children.
American Housing Survey for the United States in 1985
, Current Housing Reports, H-150-85 (December 1988), Table 3-22.
American Housing Survey for the United States: 2001
, Annual Survey (2001), Table 3-22. The difference between BLS and American Housing Survey data may in part be due to the fact that BLS data separates married couples, whereas American Housing Survey lumps together both married and single homeowners. AHS data may be skewed by the growing number of single mothers, who live in much smaller and less expensive homes than their married counterparts, thus reducing the average amount spent by households with children.

32
BLS,
Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1980
, prepublished Table 5, Selected Characteristics and Annual Expenditures of All Consumer Units Classified by Composition of Consumer Unit, Interview Survey, 1980;
Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1999
(prepublished data), Table 1500, Composition of Consumer Unit: Average Annual Expenditures and Characteristics (data are for husband and wife with children).

33
“Americans Put Education at Top of Federal Spending Priorities,”
Public Agenda Online,
April 2001. Available at
http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/majprop.cfm?issue_type=education
[1/20/2003].

34
See, for example, Arthur Levine, “American Education: Still Separate, Still Unequal,”
Los Angeles Times,
February 2, 2003, p. M1.

35
David E. Clark and William E. Herrin, “The Impact of Public School Attributes on Home Sale Prices in California,”
Growth and Change
31 (Summer 2000): 385-407. “The elasticity of teacher-student ratio is nearly 8 times that of murder rate and just over 10 times that of the largest environmental quality measure [proximity to interstate].”

36
Sandra E. Black, “Do Better Schools Matter? Parental Valuation of Elementary Education,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
114 (May 1999): 577-599.

37
The University of Pennsylvania made other modest investments in the neighborhood, including hiring trash collectors to remove litter from the streets and employing neighborhood safety “ambassadors.” Those initiatives, however, did not represent major changes, since the university had already been policing the area for several years; many locals agree that the new elementary school was by far the most important change. Caitlin Francke, “Penn Area Revival Lures Many, Pushes Others Out,”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
February 24, 2003.

38
George H. Gallup, “The Eleventh Annual Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools,”
Phi Delta Kappan
(September 1979), p. 37. “More Than Half of Americans Say Public Education Is Worse Today Than When They Were Students,”
Public Agenda Online
(April 2000), available at
http://www.publicagendaorg/issues/pcc_detail.cfm?issue_type=education&list=16
[1/20/2003] .

39
Black parents are almost three times more likely than other parents to report that they are “completely dissatisfied” with the quality of their children’s schools. Lydia Saad, “Grade School Receives Best Parent Ratings, Education Nationally Gets Modest Ratings,”
Gallup Poll Analyses,
September 4, 2002.

40
Juliet Schor,
Do Americans Shop Too Much?
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), p. 11.

41
Thomas D. Snyder and Charlene M. Hoffman,
Digest of Education Statistics, 2001,
NCES 2001-130 (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, February 2002), Table 150, Percent of Public Schools Reporting Crime Incidents and the Seriousness of Crime Incidents Reported, by School Characteristics, 1996-1997.

42
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice, 2000,
NCJ 190251 (December 2001), Table 2.0001, Students Age 12 to 18 Reporting Fear of School-Related Victimization.

43
For a discussion of the financial effects of restrictive zoning, see Michael Schill, “Regulatory Barriers to Housing Development in the United States,” in
Land Law in Comparative Perspective,
edited by Maria Elena Sanchez Jordan and Antonio Gambara (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2002), pp. 101-120.

44
“Violent Crime Fell 9% in ’01, Victim Survey Shows,”
New York Times,
September 9, 2002; the article cites a 50 percent decline in violent crime since 1993.

45
U.S. Department of Justice,
1995 Uniform Crime Reports
(1996), cited in Setha M. Low, “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear,”
American Anthropologist
103 (March 2001): 45-58. In a 1975 survey of homeowners, the U.S. Census Bureau found that people living in city centers were 38 percent more likely to complain of crime in their neighborhoods than their suburban counterparts. Today urban dwellers are 125 percent more likely than suburbanites to cite crime in their neighborhoods. Bureau of the Census,
American Housing Survey: 1975, Indicators of Housing and Neighborhood Quality,
Current Housing Reports, H-150-75B (February 1977), Table A-4, Selected Neighborhood Characteristics, 1975;
American Housing Survey, 1999,
Current Housing Reports, H150/99 (October 2000), Table 3-8, Neighborhood—Owner Occupied Units.

46
Danilo Yanich, “Location, Location, Location: Urban and Suburban Crime on Local TV News,”
Journal of Urban Affairs
23, no. 3-4 (2001): 221-241, Table 2, Rates of Selected Crimes in Baltimore and Philadelphia, 1977 and 1996.

47
Yanich, “Location, Location, Location,” p. 222.

48
While this is not exclusively an urban-suburban dichotomy, urban dwellers are more than twice as likely as suburbanites to say that the public elementary schools are so bad that they would like to move. Similarly, parents who have young children and own homes in urban areas are almost 70 percent more likely to be unsatisfied with the public elementary schools in their neighborhoods than those living in the suburbs. Bureau of the Census,
American Housing Survey, 1999,
Current Housing Reports, H150/99, Table 3-8.

49
Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey,
The State of Working America, 2002-03
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) p. 103.

50
See, for example, Congressional Research Service,
Women and Credit: Synopsis of Prospective Findings of Study on Available Legal Remedies Against Sex Discrimination in the Granting of Credit and Possible State Statutory Origins of Unequal Treatment Based Primarily on the Credit Applicant’s Sex or Marital Status.
Prepared for the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, House Committee on Banking and Currency;
Hearings on Credit Discrimination
, by Sylvia L. Beckey, U.S. House of Representatives, 93rd Congress, 2nd sess., May 2, 1974; and Margaret J. Gates, “Credit Discrimination Against Women: Causes and Solutions,”
Vanderbilt Law Review
27 (1974): 409-441.

51
Federal Trade Commission,
Equal Credit Opportunity
. Information sheet for consumers, available at
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/ecoa.htm
[1/20/03].

52
Mark Evan Edwards, “Home Ownership, Affordability, and Mothers’ Changing Work and Family Roles,”
Social Science Quarterly
82 (June 2001): 369-383; Sharon Danes and Mary Winter, “The Impact of the Employment of the Wife on the Achievement of Home Ownership,”
Journal of Consumer Affairs
24, no. 1 (1990): 148-169.

53
In a survey of 1,000 working mothers, 80 percent reported that their main reason for working was to support their families. Carin Rubenstein, “The Confident Generation: Working Moms Have a Brand New Attitude,”
Working Mother,
May 1994, p. 42.

54
Calculated from Bureau of the Census,
Historical Income Tables—Families,
Current Population Survey, various Annual Demographic Supplements, Table F-14, Work Experience of Husband and Wife—All Married-Couple Families, by Presence of Children Under 18 Years Old and Median and Mean Income: 1976 to 2000.

55
Kristin Smith, Barbara Downs, and Martin O’Connell, “Maternity Leave and Patterns: 1961-1995,”
Household Economic Studies,
U.S. Census Bureau, November 2001, Table I, Women Working at a Job, by Monthly Interval After First Birth, 1961-65 to 1991-94.

56
Stephanie Coontz,
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
(New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 162.

57
Between 1979 and 2000, married mothers at all income levels increased their hours in the workforce. However, women whose husbands were in the bottom quintile added 334 hours per year, and those in the top quintile added just 315 hours per year, compared with an average increase of 428 hours per year for women in the middle three quintiles. Calculated from
The State of Working America 2002-2003,
Table 1.32, Annual Hours, Wives in Prime-Age, Married-Couple Families with Children, and Contributions to Change, 1979-2000, Sorted by Husband’s Income.