was smashed.26 In the years immediately following, almost all major retailers left the city and so did almost every large employer.27
Four decades later fewer than twenty-five thousand households remained in the city. Half of its residents were African American and more than four in ten were Hispanic—most of them Puerto Rican—with only a smattering of elderly whites and newcomer Asians. Median household income remained abysmally low—under twenty-nine thousand dollars—and more than a third of Camden’s families lived below the official poverty line: 44 percent of families with children were poor. Unemployment between 2008 and 2010 averaged 22 percent. Roughly 15 percent of the city’s households claimed government disability payments (SSI), and about 12 percent received cash payments from the welfare system, while nearly three in ten collected Food Stamps—all very high rates as compared with the nation as a whole. Four in ten adults lacked a high school diploma or GED, and the high school dropout rate stood at 70 percent.28
From the days of the Moynihan controversy onward, academic researchers and journalists who have focused on the lives of so-called fatherless families have looked almost exclusively at African Americans, lending the impression that “fatherlessness” is a black problem. By the mid-1990s, however, black rates of unwed childbearing had leveled off, while among whites (and Hispanics) the growth was substantial. By the end of that decade 40 percent of all nonmarital births in the United States were to non-Hispanic whites, while only a third were to blacks.29 By the time we began our study, the so-called fatherless family, which Moynihan had labeled a black issue, had spread beyond America’s disadvantaged minorities.
Thus, though we started in Camden, we expanded our focus to lower-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia, a city with minority neighborhoods with similar social ills as Camden’s but also with predominantly white neighborhoods that, while not nearly as poor as some of its black sections, still had pockets of poverty.30 Philadelphia was also an industrial giant, and it too peaked in the 1950s. As noted earlier, it also had an influential race riot in 1964 that coincided with dramatic changes in the economic and racial complexion of the city.
Today Philadelphia is a largely black and white city, with only a small representation of Hispanics and Asians. The median household income stands at just under thirty-six thousand dollars, and poverty rates are much lower than Camden’s—20 percent (29 percent of families with children). A much smaller proportion claim government assistance in Philadelphia.31 Unemployment, at 13 percent, is still above the national average. Nearly eight out of ten adults (79 percent) have at least a GED, but only 56 percent of the city’s public high school students graduate within four years.32
Taken together, the metro area as a whole bears similarity to many rustbelt cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic regions. In 2011 its unemployment rate stood at just under 9 percent, similar to rates in the Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, Milwaukee, Saint Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago metropolitan areas. Out of the forty-nine largest metro areas, it ranks twenty-second by this measure.33 Still, Camden and Philadelphia are among the nation’s poorest cities—in 2007 Philadelphia was the ninth poorest of all large cities, while Camden was narrowly edged out by Bloomington, Indiana, as the poorest city in the nation, a designation Camden has earned in most years.34 At this writing it has just earned the title again, edging out last year’s winner, Reading, Pennsylvania. It is also America’s second most dangerous city, but a recent spate of murders has put it very close on the heels of the first-place winner, Flint, Michigan.35 Given the stark economic conditions of Philadelphia and Camden and the income restrictions we imposed on our sample—which we limited to men earning less than sixteen thousand dollars in the prior year in the formal economy (roughly the poverty line for a family of four in 2000)—our results must be interpreted with some caution; not all unwed fathers live in places with so many economic challenges, nor are all unwed fathers as disadvantaged as the men in our story. But because a disproportionate number of unmarried fathers are disadvantaged across a variety of domains, many men who have a child without benefit of a marital tie do so under similar conditions.
Nationwide, poor whites rarely live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and Hispanics are also less likely than African Americans to do so. This substantial difference in neighborhood conditions sometimes leads to misleading comparisons, for while disadvantaged minorities usually come of age in communities with daunting challenges and precious few resources, poor whites are much more likely to enjoy the good schools, safe streets, plentiful jobs, and enriching social activities that are so beneficial to young people as they navigate the transition to adulthood. Philadelphia offered us an unusual advantage: the chance to study disadvantaged whites whose neighborhood contexts were somewhat more similar to those of economically challenged blacks. In selecting our neighborhoods, we took full advantage of this feature of the city.
THE FATHERS
Over the seven years we spent on street corners and front stoops, in front rooms and kitchens, at fast food restaurants, rec centers, and bars in each of these neighborhoods, we persuaded 110 low-income unwed fathers to share their stories with us, sometimes over the course of several months, or even years. We recruited roughly equal numbers of African Americans and whites, the two groups who constitute the large majority of the population in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.36 Fathers ranged in age from seventeen to sixty-four, yet we made sure that roughly half of the fathers were over thirty when we spoke with them so we could tell the story of inner-city unwed fatherhood across the life course. Their experiences were varied, but all were fathers with at least one child under the age of nineteen they did not have legal custody of, and all hailed from city tracts that were working class or poor.37
Because the men we were interested in talking with were often not stably attached to households, and some were involved in illicit activities they were eager to hide from outsiders, we did not attempt a random sample; instead, we tried for as much heterogeneity as we could.38 Within each poor and working-class neighborhood we had identified using census data, we began by trying to solicit referrals from grassroots community organizations and social service agencies. But we soon learned that few of the fathers we sought were involved in these groups, and those who were—usually drug addicts in rehab or homeless men sleeping in shelters—were far from representative. We then visited local business strips, train and trolley stops, day labor agencies, and other employers in these neighborhoods in the late afternoons, when work shifts ended and many residents were out and about. We also simply walked the streets, striking up casual conversations with men we encountered and posting fliers on telephone poles and in corner stores, check-cashing outlets, liquor stores, and bars. We also invited early participants to refer us to other fathers whom we might have missed on our own.
With these unconventional recruitment strategies, it was surprisingly easy to convince fathers to talk with us. Getting them to speak candidly about their views and experiences required more work. No researchers enter fully into the lives of their subjects, and we do not claim to have done so. In the end what won the confidence of most men was our willingness to become neighbors and our eagerness to gain some firsthand experience with the contexts in which they lived. Our own backgrounds still marked us as outsiders but also allowed us to authentically claim the role of novices seeking the fathers’ expertise in understanding the rhythm and risks of daily life.39
Our conversations with each father, usually stretching across several meetings, were wide-ranging and in-depth. We asked fathers to begin by describing their own childhoods and families of origin, and what it was like for them growing up. We tracked their paths through adolescence and early adulthood; their experiences with peers, school, and work; and the beginning and end of each romantic relationship. They described the circumstances surrounding the births of each of their children and the often shifting patterns of involvement in their children’s lives. We asked how they had come to make the choices they had, what they wished had gone differently, and what they planned for the future.
The question that originally prompted our study—is it true that these
