As poor families migrate, can aid keep up?

In the past few years, Mario Garcia has noticed some changes in Chicago's West Town neighborhood where he heads the Onward Neighborhood House, a nonprofit that has provided childcare, after-school programs, and job training to immigrant families for more than a century.

Waiting lists for programs aren't as long, and many of the families he serves have moved out of West Town. Enrollment at the local elementary school has dwindled to half of what it once was.

So Onward is branching out, opening a new location for the first time, in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood several miles northwest, where the number of families in need is booming, and few services exist.

A report released Thursday by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago highlights the many mismatches in the geography of services and need. Families – particularly poor families – are moving away from Chicago's downtown and lakefront to the city's outer edges and suburbs. Meanwhile, the less mobile service providers often remain in the old neighborhoods.

The study is unusual in its depth and immediacy, but experts say such a mismatch is common, especially in large, sprawling urban areas.

Chicago's government is hoping that the study – which will be regularly updated – will provide real-time demographics and predictions that could prove invaluable to nonprofits and city services often struggling to keep up with the families they serve.

"It's not really an issue whether services work or not if you can't get them to the families," says Robert Goerge, a fellow at Chapin Hall and the lead researcher on the study. "Traditionally, Chicago's poor kids have lived in very specific communities – the near south side, the west side. They seem now to be spread out across the city more and more."

His research, which studied public school enrollment, unemployment, age-specific food-stamp figures, and census data, gives a current picture of how those trends are playing out, and projects the shifts through 2010.

A big driver of the recent changes, Dr. Goerge says, is both the growth and high mobility of Hispanics in Chicago. The demolition of Chicago's public housing projects has also dispersed many poor families.

The trends he's spotted confirm what many social-service providers in the city were already beginning to notice. In the gentrifying West Town, for instance, there was a 44 percent decrease in the number of children in poverty between 1990 and 2005, and a 51 percent decrease in the number of Hispanic children.

Meanwhile, the Belmont Cragin neighborhood, where Onward's new building will be opening in June – a bustling mix of modest brick homes, taquerías, and business signs in Spanish and Polish – is seeing some of the fastest growth in the city: a 280 percent increase in the number of children living in poverty, and a 134 percent increase in Hispanic children.

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