Understanding and Addressing Resource Underutilization in Bronx Communities

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 14. Welfare

Abstract

This paper examines persistent resource underutilization in the Bronx despite high levels of poverty, health disparities, and food insecurity. While prior research documents structural hardship in the borough, less attention has been paid to why eligible residents disengage from healthcare, social service, and workforce development programs. Rather than framing underutilization as a simple issue of awareness or access, this study conceptualizes it as a stratification puzzle situated at the intersection of social mobility processes and racialized institutional experiences.
Drawing on theories of status attainment and rational action (Sewell et al. 1969; Featherman & Hauser 1978; Goldthorpe 1997; Solon 2016), the paper argues that program engagement reflects constrained cost–benefit calculations shaped by administrative burden, time poverty, digital inequality, and uncertain returns. Simultaneously, racial formation and boundary process theories (Omi & Winant 2015; Anderson 2015; Saperstein & Penner 2018) illuminate how institutional encounters are racialized, producing mistrust, surveillance, and signals of exclusion. These dynamics are further intensified for formerly incarcerated residents navigating reentry constraints.
Methodologically, the study employs a multi-sited ethnographic design across a community health clinic, benefits enrollment center, workforce program, and food pantry in South and Central Bronx communities. Data collection includes participant observation, semi-structured interviews with residents and frontline staff, go-along shadowing, and artifact analysis. The project develops an explanatory framework of “pathways to (non)utilization,” linking mobility aspirations, racialized encounters, carceral spillovers, and digital barriers.
By integrating stratification theory with institutional ethnography, this research advances sociological understandings of inequality and offers policy-relevant insights for reducing administrative friction and designing more equitable service systems.

Author

• Justine Korkor McCarthy, Howard University