(Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)
A child’s zip code shouldn’t determine whether they escape poverty, but it often does, said Kala Gibson, executive vice president and chief corporate responsibility officer at Fifth Third Bank.
The Detroit native who oversees corporate citizenship work at the bank, which includes community development and community impact banking, said too many places still exist where children are robbed of opportunities to live the American dream because of where they grew up and the color of their skin.
Kala Gibson (Photo: Greg Childress/NC Newsline)“You can talk to a child and just ask them, where they’re born, their zip code, what school district they’re in and you have a 50% chance of being correct … that they’re not getting out of poverty, and that’s sad,” Gibson said.
Gibson made his remarks in Chapel Hill last week during the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise’s fourth annual Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality. The conference featured experts from the public and private sectors and academia who discussed new ways in which businesses can contribute to inclusive economic growth in the U.S.
Conference host LaChaun Banks, a professor in the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, set the tone for the event that is aimed at reducing income inequality.
LaChaun Banks (Photo: UNC Chapel Hill)“The American dream should not be dependent on zip code, family circumstances or family wealth,” Banks said.
Conferees, Banks said, share a common belief that economic opportunities and upward mobility matter.
“We’ve witnessed a lot of innovation and technological advancement, but as you all know alongside that success, we’ve also seen disparities of wealth, opportunity and economic stability,” Banks said. “For many people, economic growth has felt distant from their daily reality.”
Gibson’s work at Fifth Third Bank — the nation’s ninth largest bank — is deeply personal, he said, because he grew up in a community where there were few opportunities to escape poverty.
Banks have a “high responsibility” to help people achieve the American dream, he said.
“If you’re not in a financial system, you have no ability to be able to own a home, to build wealth, build equity, retire comfortably or see your kids go to college or vocational school,” Gibson said.
Gibson highlighted Fifth Third Bank’s Neighborhood Program, a multiyear initiative created in 2021 to provide nine historically African American neighborhoods across seven states with capital, expertise and technical support to build equitable growth and create economic mobility.
Each neighborhood was eligible to receive up to $20 million. By the time the program ended in December 2025, Fifth Third Bank had made $409.2 million in direct investments into the nine neighborhoods.
The investment leveraged many millions more and resulted in construction of 603 affordable multifamily units and 124 affordable for-purchase homes. More than 500 homes were also preserved.
The Historic West End community in Charlotte was one of the nine neighborhoods that took part in the initiative. The work there focused on preserving homes, anti-displacement strategies and the creation of affordable mixed-income housing.
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“We were really focused on homeownership and making sure there wasn’t displacement because a lot of times with these types of initiatives, there’s a significant amount of displacement, particularly as it relates to our seniors,” Gibson said.
Neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus in Ohio, Chicago, Tampa, Florida, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Louisville, Kentucky were also part of the bank’s program.
“What you would find in all of these neighborhoods is that they’re all just sitting on an island,” Gibson said. “Typically, they’re financial islands, meaning there’s not a financial center or bank anywhere to be seen.”
Gibson said such communities are usually also food deserts without a grocery store and without access to healthcare nearby.
“They are literally deserts,” he said. “Sometimes, they are right smack dab in the middle of these upper mobility neighborhoods.”
In an interview with NC Newsline, Gibson acknowledged the bank’s motives aren’t solely altruistic.
“We want individuals in all neighborhoods to be customers in Fifth Third,” Gibson said. “In order to do that, you have to go into the neighborhoods, you have to listen to what people need and then you try to match your products to their problem that needs to be solved.”
A fading dream
A cornerstone of the American dream is that any child, through hard work, has a chance to earn more than their parents, said Gregory Bruich, a lecturer and adviser in economics at Harvard University.
It’s a lot tougher for children to escape poverty today than it was in 1940 when 92% of children born that year went on to earn more than their parents, Bruich said.
Greg Bruich (Photo: Opportunity Insights)“You look at what’s happened over time, you can see that there’s been a dramatic fading of the American dream, such that for children born in the 1980s, and we’ve updated the series through 1990, it’s essentially turned into a 50-50 shot whether you’re gonna make more money than your parents,” Bruich said.
Bruich is a research principal at Opportunity Insights, a non-partisan research and policy institute based at Harvard University that uses “big data” to analyze the root causes of economic inequality and develop solutions to help families escape poverty.
Communities with lower poverty rates such as Chapel Hill produce better outcomes for children, Bruich said. Two-parent households also generally produce better outcomes, he said.
“What’s interesting about that result is it looks like it’s something about the community as opposed to your own family,” Bruich said. “So, even if you look at kids who have two parents in a household, if they grow up in a neighborhood where it’s more single parents, their outcomes are worse, so it’s not so much about your own family.”
Communities that produce better outcomes for low-income children also have better schools and social capital, which Bruich said proves the African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child.
He said reducing segregation, making strategic investments in low-income neighborhoods and helping low-income families make better use of housing vouchers can also improve outcomes for low-income people.
Studies show that mixed-income neighborhoods that have become increasingly popular benefit low-income children more than their parents, who often do not see their incomes increase. A mixed-income community blends market-rate homes with dedicated affordable or subsidized units.
“It looks like this is a great program,” Bruich said. “It looks like incomes in these areas go up a huge amount, but it turns out that that’s mostly driven by those mixed income features of the development.”
Tax data and census data show that children who grew up in mixed-income communities have better economic outcomes than their parents, he said.
“This is looking at the average incomes for the kids who were living in these neighborhoods before the revitalization and then after the revitalization. You can see a tremendous impact,” Bruich said.
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