I submit that bump’s “clusters of apartments” are still too concentrated. What I have in mind is more like one poor family that does not have any other poor families adjacent to them.
I’ll admit I’m not certain what the best policy is here. But I can see potential problems with dispersing the poor.
If you place poor people among non-poor people, they’re going to compare themselves to the people around them. While they won’t be any worse off objectively, they’re going to feel worse off because they’ll see that the people around them have more than they have.
The opposite side of this is how the non-poor people will see the poor people living among them. Poor people living among other poor people at least are part of a community. In a non-poor community, the poor people might become pariahs with no peers in their community.
Poor people often get ripped off by businesses in their communities but at least those businesses exist. In a non-poor community, poor people might find there are no businesses interested in serving them at the level they can afford.
Poor communities allow the government to target more services to the poor by economics of scale. An organization in a poor neighbourhood can serve dozens of poor families. Spread those poor families out and no organization will be able to reach all of them. Or at best, more resources will be spend on delivering services and less will remain for the actual services themselves.
Disregard the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Many civilized cultures have some customs that obviously hark back to a prehuman state.
I don’t think the concentration of poverty is why poverty sucks. Inequality–the gulf between poverty and not-poverty–is what makes people criminal and dysfunctional. Not geography.
We have a great case study of what happens when poor and middle-class (and sometimes wealthy) people are forced to live together. See places like Sweet Auburn during the first part of the 20th century. This forced “togetherness” did offer some benefits to the unfortunate and the community as a whole. But I don’t think it would work as well today.
I say this because social inequality is a lot worse now than it was back then, and it has got us completely warped. Distrust is the key word. The well-to-do won’t trust the poor folks not to steal them blind. The poor folks won’t trust their well-to-do neighbors not to call the cops on them just for saying “good morning”. Everyone loses when we’re distrustful like this.
If your neighbor can’t afford a car and here you are with three of them (plus a bicycle…plus a motorcycle), how are you going to feel every day when you see your neighbor standing at the bus stop?
How are you going to feel if you are the one at the bus stop?
You’re up for partner at your law firm. Across the street from you lives the lady who cleans your office building. While she’s a doll, she certainly loves her lawn flamingos and her reggaeton. Your boss wants you to invite him over for dinner. Will you be comfortable with him seeing your neighborhood’s color? Do you think your boss will understand why you want to live there? Or will he think you’re a cuckoo idealist with your head in the sand, to live across the street from Juanita the Janitor and her loud-ass reggaeton?
People live in harmony whenever they feel they are on the same page as their neighbors…with the same values and leanings and fortune in life. Back in the day, the differences between us weren’t so great as they are today 1 ) because we weren’t so different socioeconomically and 2) because we weren’t constantly bombarded with ideas that make us socioeconomically anxious. But now we’re ALL sweating our respective positions in the social hierarchy. The middle-class is grasping at anything it can hold onto to distinguish it from the poor. Making them live with poor people shatters the illusion that they’re naturally superior and that they will one day become wealthy. If you don’t have a “good” zip code, how will people know that you aren’t a loser? And if you’re the poor guy living next door to the rich guy with three cars and a boat, why WOULDN’T you covet his kid’s motorcycle…when your ass has to take the bus all the time and everyone knows only losers with no girlfriends ride the bus? In a divided society, everyone’s crazy reactions make sense.
I’m trying to find a cite, but I once read about a study that showed health disparities between poor and middle-class people were actually greater when poor people are the numerical minority in their neighborhoods. The stress of being the “loser” in the community offsets the health benefits you’d expect from sharing space with well-to-do people. Interesting and (for me) not surprising. Not only do poor people who are “dispersed” carry the psychological stigma of being the poor people in the midst of affluence, but they also have more limited access to services. Where are you more likely to find a free clinic? In a middle-class neighborhood where everyone has health insurance? Or in an area with concentrated poverty where everyone knows the free clinic is right around the corner, next to the WIC office.
I think we need to define “dispersal” because I thought the argument was living in projects vs living elsewhere. A lot of the things you brought up would still be available to people living in duplex style developments for section 8 and low income people just as easily as to those who live in a gigantic concrete prison, monstro.
Also I think you’re radically over-estimating the services available to people in the projects due to their high concentration anyway. For example, the chances of dying of gunshot wounds go up the farther away you are from a hospital, and inthe case of Chicago poor neighborhoods:
Considering how terrible cities have been at providing services to those in the project (y’know…like safety) I can’t see that the argument for pro-high concentration of poverty just for the services.
Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not advocating projects or “concentrated poverty”. I’m not advocating anything. I’m just explaining why a general “dispersal” policy isn’t really a solution to the ills of poverty.
OTOH, they get to enjoy a cleaner, safer neighborhood with better schools and better public services. Doesn’t that count for something?
Interesting points, monstro.
I can think of some things we could do about that, but politically they’re even harder to sell in the U.S. than a poverty-dispersal program.
Why not just make the poor neighborhoods cleaner, safer and better?
Those kinds of niceties do matter, don’t get me wrong. But so does feeling accepted in the community. I know that I don’t care so much about cleaniness as much as I do how I’m treated. If people turn up their noses whenever I wave to them or they complain to me that barbequing in the front yard “just isn’t done around here” or the cops harrass my kids because they look “criminal”, I’m not going to want to live in that community. I’m not even a social person and I care about stuff like this. I can only imagine how someone who is sociable would feel. It would be exhausting and frustrating to be treated as an outsider…to feel like an outsider. And be an outsider.
That sounds like an even harder sell politically. For one thing, it’s a lot more expensive.
Really? More expensive than distributing poor people so as not to overwhelm any one particular community or neighborhood, and yet still maintain access to jobs, public transportation, healthcare, religious institutions, and family members?
Cuz that sounds expensive to me.
- Shrug * Reality can be very, very ugly. Have you seen photos of Detroit lately?
Two points:
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The underlined part is the problem. I don’t care if it’ll help their children’s children. I don’t want them leaving trash in my yard now. I don’t want them peeing in my bushes or breaking into my house and stealing my flat-screen while I’m at work now.
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The Irish immigrants didn’t need any special government intervention to “disperse” them among the wealthy. They figured it out on their own (probably after a couple of generations).
OTOH, there have been no serious efforts at urban renewal in this country since the 1970s. Don’t you think the cost is one reason?
I think you underestimate the large numbers of people that poor people consider very close family. Today I was introduced to a small child as “my great-great-grandnephew”. This woman (my patient) had picked him up from the hairdresser where some other not-terribly-close-in-my-world-view relative had dropped him off after taking him shopping for school supplies. He’s staying with her until Sunday, when his mom can pick him up to spend the night with her before school starts Monday.
Cute kid. Sweet, polite, respectful (if a little bit intimidated by the white nurse in his great-great-grandauntie’s living room), eager to start preschool in a couple of days. Statistically, he’s depressingly likely to be hit by a bullet before he graduates high school…if he graduates high school.
But how do you move a family like that out of the ghetto without other poor families adjacent to them? They’re a huge multi-household family, and they help each other out multiple times a week, with shopping and child care and money and rides. Take one household out of the chain and it collapses.
[QUOTE=rogerbox]
Also I think you’re radically over-estimating the services available to people in the projects due to their high concentration anyway. For example, the chances of dying of gunshot wounds go up the farther away you are from a hospital, and inthe case of Chicago poor neighborhoods
That’s my turf. Not where I live, but where I work. And the problem is really, really simple: south side hospitals are shit. They’re poor, and they take mostly Medicaid/care patients, and they can’t afford modern equipment or attract or retain decent staff, and they certainly don’t have the money to build or maintain the staffing, equipment and training needed for trauma certification. Walking into Jackson Park Hospital is like walking into a time warp. They’re still using gravity fed IV’s, for goodness’ sakes! They don’t have chucks for the patient’s beds, or enough sheets to change them every day. They didn’t have colostomy bags for one of my patients who was there for a reversal, so they just let his bag leak shit all over him and his bed. The nurses literally shrug and can’t give me a report on what’s happening with my patients, what their last labs were, or even their primary diagnosis. It’s disgusting, and I’m only surprised they don’t kill more people.
Roseland’s pretty much the same. Trinity literally has dust covering most of the surfaces in the ER, because they’ve laid off most of their housekeeping staff.
If you get shot, better hope you’re lucky enough to do it by University of Chicago, which is at least clean and fairly up to date, but they never met a problem they wouldn’t try to solve with majorly invasive surgery.
So, in that sense, integrating neighborhoods with multiple income levels makes sense…but now it’s a vicious cycle. No one with private insurance will go to Jackson Park, because they suck, so they never make enough money to not suck. And when you have a city with the huge population Chicago does, with more than 200 hospitals, the rich folks are going to continue to drive to Northwestern while the poor people can barely keep the doors open at Roseland, whether they’re neighbors or not.
There’s one really nice ghetto that I work in. I can’t figure it out. It’s clean, the buildings are new and still well maintained. There’s no trash in the yards, the streets get swept frequently…and the whole area is deserted.
Go to this map and turn on street view, if it doesn’t work automatically: Google Maps
See how there’s no one there? That’s how it looks all the time. No people. Where are the people? Scan around you: beautiful park, wonderful playground. No one is ever in them. Those nice apartment buildings are Section 8, and the interiors are as nicely maintained as the exteriors…until you get into the units themselves. Then they’re filthy, with stained mattresses on the floor and school aged children sleeping in the bedrooms during school hours and their parent - hardly ever parents, just parent - and “friends” sitting on the stained mattress in the living room watching cable on a big screen TV.
I just…I don’t get it. I try, I really try, not to be judgey. But goddamn, some of these assholes make it hard. I’m sick of calling Child Services. I’m sick of arranging for HUD to bring them actual furniture, and then going in a week later to find it’s been sold or “stolen”. I’m tired of hiring homemakers to clean, and finding them sprawled on the dirty mattresses with the tenants.
I fucking hate that block, pretty though it is.
What might fix it? I wish I knew. Maybe jobs. Actual fucking worthwhile rewarding meaningful work that pays more than public aid. There aren’t any. There’s absolutely no reason for a person to work when they can’t get a job that pays more than SSDI+food stamps+housing assistance+CEDA.
Except maybe to get another big screen TV.
Oh, I daresay no one ever needed corrupting less than Paris Hilton. 
Look, if you live in a suburban neighborhood with a few Section 8 housing units scattered here and there, their residents will not be a crime problem for you – because your local police know who they are and will keep a close watch on them. In the inner city, a kid can snatch a purse and immediately fade into the background, just one more face in the projects.
And why do you even care who pees in your bushes (assuming inner-city poor folks or third-worlders even would do that)?! It won’t kill the bushes, and any other problem it creates is gone with the next rain.
Is your world a totally controlled scheme where you get to tell people where they can live? I can afford to move if I don’t like the direction the neighborhood is going. Then what do you do?
These fantasies of dispersing the poor so they can be uplifted by being surrounded by the not poor are just that, fantasies. No way to implement it without controlling where people live by force. And this is appealing to who? What a terribly shitty world to live in - good thing it’s just communist/socialist/fascist xxx-ist fantasy.
Do you guarantee it? I can afford to not live next to section 8 housing. Why would I choose to live there when I don’t have to. Unless you’ve found a way to compel me to do so.
:dubious: Please do not associate those words ever again so long as you live. That’s bullshit and you know it.