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njlauren -> RE: What causes urban poverty (3/24/2013 9:16:08 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: vincentML
~FR~
Poverty in the inner cities is a fact of life and a child of history. No one is at fault. But no one cares or is able to do the heavy lifting to fix it. Or the ideology of competing politics hinders a solution. Take your choice.
When the civil rights crisis occurred in Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, etc . . when college students road the integrated buses into the southland after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat there was great resistance by the established and frightened whites in the south. At the same time there was a surge of Negro migration northward.
The Negro migration north frightened whites in the northern cities. MLK's assassination spurred black riots in the north and added to the fear of whites. I witnessed the outward migration from the cities both in NJ where I taught in the late 60s and in Miami where I taught in the 70s. I recall the safe and prosperous downtown shopping district in Newark. I also recall the National Guard tanks rumbling along Springfield Avenue.
In the outlying areas, farmland was converted to new housing developments and sleepy country schools were built up, consolidated and quickly overcrowded. We cannot discount the effect of the surge of our national economy after WWII and the new demand for housing. Nor can we discount the facility afforded by the National Highway System built in the 1950s. The new highways gave easy access to the new suburbs. They also bypassed formally prosperous downtown areas. Miami’s prosperous black Overtown community of mom and pop businesses was cut in half by I-95 and isolated from the city’s commerce. The mandated integration of schools by busing undoubtedly impacted neighborhood change. I taught in an all black school in Miami and saw teachers who were so frightened they brought guns to work, and yet the kids were pretty wonderful. I also taught in tri-racially/ethnically mixed schools without incident. I can say I had an inside view.
That was the history. There was no blame. That's just the way it happened.
Now the result. The history of white emigration from the cities to the burbs left blacks in the inner city without transportation and without work because industry and white owned small businesses emigrated as well. Our black population was ghettoized by the historical events of the 50s and 60s in major cities like Philly, Detroit, Chicago, Newark, etc. Theirs is a desperate situation of poverty and the attendant crime that goes with drugs and unemployment. The lack of jobs is not their fault. And the emigration of whites seeking a safe residence and education for their kids cannot be faulted.
Jobs are needed. Not talk. Economic revitalization of our cities has to be a national priority.
That is why the proposal for an interracial dialogue is not a solution. Especially since it stems from the perceived need to salve the fears of whites who were left behind on the fringes of black neighborhoods. Talk is bullshit. Useless. We have a monumental economic catastrophe on our hands. Our cities never recovered from the post War social change.
I don't know whatever happened to Jack Kemp's Enterprise Zones but probably the only solution is some kind of Government/Industry partnership to bring jobs back to the cities beginning with assembly work that can be done by high school drop outs and single mothers. And we may need police and fire protection in the beginning. Also government subsidized property insurance for businesses in blighted areas. Maybe combining the schools with new industries. Otherwise, I do not have a solution either.
But, until the cities are revitalized economically interracial discourse is a waste of time because the unemployed do not trust the threatened and the threatened do not trust the unemployed. America cannot continue as a nation divided city from suburbs, blacks from whites. It is a national disgrace and disaster.
Your analysis is dead spot on in many ways. The interstate highway system helped the flight from the cities, and highways in the cities destroyed vibrant neighborhoods, in large part thanks to Robert Moses, who fucked up NYC, then exported his 'expertise' to other cities, where highways went right through neighborhoods, and destroyed them. Then, too, the VA mortgages that allowed people to buy houses in the burbs, helped white flight from the city,the boroughs, to Long Island and NJ and so forth. Governments spent money building roads and schools, in a flush time, and that drew people. Plus the government also tended to cut funding for things that helped the cities, like transit aid, to build highways and roads out in the burbs.
The migration of blacks from down south to the north had its impact as well, and that started in the 1920's. My mom went to Morris High School in the south bronx in the early 40's (same high school Colin Powell graduated from in the late 50's), and even then there was a large population of blacks (I apologize for using the term black, I still have problems with African American, for a lot of reasons...), a lot of them were middle and working class...and if my mom's stories are true, they were worried about the southern migration, because the people coming up from down south were the children of Jim Crow, ill educated, lacking skills since most of them had been agricultural workers, and in some ways ill adjusted to city life.....so that brought its own issues, the city schools and such didn't quite know how to handle the situation, and also, obviously, there was also probably elements of discrimination at work.
And this migration happened as jobs started moving out of the cities, as they migrated to the burbs or ironically, down south, to take advantage of cheap labor.....so you had that problem, that jobs moved out as they moved in.
The welfare state had a role to play, though it wasn't the total cause some people claim, the way it was structured it almost had a hand in breaking up families, or making it desirable not to have them. Instead of finding ways to subsidize families, make them happen, they almost made it that it was better if a young woman got pregnant, that it was better not to marry the father, not to form a family, because welfare would penalize them...then later welfare to me sort of became a social pacifier, to try I guess to pour oil on the water, then when the government got scared when the cities started burning, they poured in money to programs and such, but often those ended up benefitting the bureaucrats and administrators (often known as poverty pimps) and very little helped.
In the south bronx, neighborhoods were redlined by banks and insurance companies, and the government set up insurance pools...and landlords promptly stared torching their buildings to collect the insurance and then they walked away; social service agencies had programs to help people who lost their stuff in a fire, and word got out, and people would move their crap out, and torch their apartment, and collect the social services money, and with so many buildings burning, no one looked all the closely, and a good part of the south bronx was burned out.
The housing projects that were supposed to facilitate 'urban renewal', wiped out neighborhoods, that probably could have been renovated (ironiclly, dear old Robert Moses, whose ideas influenced so much, and not in good ways, wanted to do that to the west village, which today is one of the most expensive real estate areas in the city, and finally met his waterloo at the hands of two determined people, thank God).
There are major social factors, too, not to sound like Fox News, but Moynihan in the late 50's talked about the growing problem of single parent households in the black community (and it spread to the puerto Rican community as well), he then predicted what was going to happen, and was castigated by liberals and by people like Adam Clayton Powell for 'blaming the victims', which he wasn't, he predicted what would happen, and it did, and the results are pretty easy to see (and note, it isn't just the black, inner city community, they are seeing this in rural areas, among poor whites, blacks and hispanics, among others).....he predicted the cycle,of kids having kids who would have kids as kids, and it happened.There is a long history to that, with roots that probably go back to slavery, but the reality is it is there, and it has wreaked havoc.....and programs so far don't seem to be effective. I always find it pretty ironic when I hear conservative black and hispanic preachers condemning same sex marriage as 'destroying marrriage', when there are so many problems with marriage in the communities they serve. There are no simple answers, it has been allowed to fester, in part because no one wants to talk about the issues.
Public policy still favors the burbs, recently our dear governor canned building a third rail tunnel into NYC for commuting, which is sorely needed (the existing two tunnels were built in 1909, and need major improvements, which can't be done when they are in operation, plus they are shared with Amtrak, so capacity is limited), and then tried to shift money that had been allocated to it by the feds to road improvements out in the rest of the state.
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