I voted no. I have lived or spent lots of time in every questionable neighborhood in Denver (five points, capital hill, baker when it was bad, the west side, a little north east of MLK and york, etc…), but I don’t really believe Denver has a ghetto. I have driven on a highway past neighborhoods that made me believe this was the case. Every other city I have spent a signifigant amount of time in, I stayed away from the bad parts of town.
I’ve visited people there, but never lived there.
Bars on all the windows + trash all over the yards + few/no mainstream stores = don’t go outside at night.
I’m sure US ghettos pale in comparison to developing world ghettos though.
I work as an in-home behavior therapist and some of my clients have lived in very sketchy parts of Los Angeles county.
I’ve worked several places located on the edges of public housing in Nashville.
In one of those areas, it wasn’t uncommon to watch drug deals go down while you were waiting at a stoplight. One of our maintainence guys got shot just stopping for gas after work. It was that area that made me decide to buy my first cell phone when I got bumped to working evening shift.
I’ve lived in what was a working class barrio when I moved there, but over the course of seven years became pretty ghettoized (3 crack housed on my 4 block long street!).
When I was little, we lived on the corner of Manistique and Southampton in Detroit, and a few years ago the place I worked was on Plymouth Road between Schaefer and Greenfield in Detroit.
So, yeah.
I grew up in the ghetto: 24th and Leavenworth in Omaha, NE
Interesting coincidence - I was born in the South Bronx in 1970 too, where my father was also born, and my grandmother lived most all her life…we moved to Jackson Heights a few years later, and further out on Long Island a few years after that…these many years later I’d feel a little silly calling myself “from the ghetto”.
There are some great places to eat in South Central LA, so yes. USC is also smack in the middle of the area, so I have spent more than a few nights there as well.
So what?
My work involves doing environmental assessments for “affordable” housing projects. So, I routinely visit communities where housing is a real need. Most of them are in poor rural communities, but I’ve done several in South Central LA and West Oakland.
I’ve lived in Harlem, but in a time and a place where a suburban white dude could wander around at will. I did explore Harlem on foot here and there in the 80s when it was a little hairier (a lot of empty buildings then), and some of the more rundown parts of Philadelphia and DC once or twice.
Oh: I took mass transit to Yankee Stadium with my Little League team in 1973 and the walk from the subway to the stadium freaked my 8-year-old ass out.
Here’s the flat we lived in when I was born. Notice how the lots on one side of it are all empty.
here’s where I worked at my last job. Started out as Kelvinator, then when Nash-Kelvinator merged with Hudson, it became the engineering offices of American Motors Corporation (AMC) which was merged into Chrysler. Now it sits empty.
Have had occasion to frequent the Klong Toey slum in Bangkok, the largest one here. Population of 100,000, IIRC.
Was it your birthday?
Thats one of the nicest looking ghettos I have ever seen.
Unless you count that fairly depressing neighborhood right outside the Camden Yards parking lots that you have to go through to get back to I-95, not really. I work in Southeast DC currently, but the real ghetto areas are on the other side of the Anacostia River. The part I’m in isn’t great, but it’s just a bit poor, not ghetto. And there’s almost always a cop patrolling within eyesight for some reason. I’ve never felt even slightly unsafe.
In the ghetto.
Spent a couple of years as a meter-reader, then a few years as a UPS delivery driver. Yeah, I’ve been in the ghetto quite a bit, but only as a visitor.
I mentioned in another thread that I’m teaching a fairly long-term class there now, for people returning to the workforce after a long absence. This is the first time I’ve actually interacted with denizens of this part of town (beyond “Here’s your box, sign there”). For me, it’s like visiting another planet. I’ve worked quite a bit in Europe, and I think I’ve literally had more in common with middle class folks in countries where I don’t even speak the language, than I do to US-ians a few miles from my house. It’s been an eye-opener for me.
Apparently Little Haiti is a ghetto. One of the reasons my last Miami apartment was very cheap is that it was across the road, on a thin stretch of land which wasn’t quite part of Little Haiti. I would go there for part of my shopping; having found the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the local public library to be extremely anorexic (it had two of the three LotR books, that’s it), I made the librarians very happy when I left the country by handing over all my novels but two (I was sure the books I was leaving would be easy to replace; they were).
Some people reckoned that the area where I lived in South Miami was a ghetto; we seem to have different definitions. For me it was a lower middle class area with a lot of blacks and students. Turns out these people seemed to reckon any area with black residents was a ghetto - I imagine they would have rejected the notion that the Getto in Venice or the ones in Cracovia or Prague could be called by such a name.
I’ve never been to Venice - the original ghetto.
The Bonaventure really has gone downhill, hasn’t it?
The thing about the word “ghetto” is that once you live in a place, it can’t be a “ghetto” anymore. (The OP still hasn’t even defined the word.) People always use the word for places where other people live. When we lived for a while near Exposition and Normandie in L.A., some people called it “ghetto,” and that really bothered me.
In some ways, “ghetto” is a meaningless word.