Everyone seems to forget that today’s ghetto was once a nice a neighborhood. People trashed the neighborhood and turned it into a ghetto.
Nice new shiny free government housing built there will be trashed and full of bullet holes in record time.
New laws require employers to hire the ghetto dwellers. Those businesses end up trashed, full of bullet holes and bankrupt in record time.
I like this idea. There have been innumerable threads about the lack of access to good supermarkets in run down city neighborhoods. Perhaps to combine several ideas make a small shopping plaza, a decent supermarket, a small branch of the library, a day care center [extended hours, say 6 am to 9 pm to allow for differing shifts] that is reasonably priced and has the ability for an after school tutoring program and good security - guards and video monitoring. Since it would end up being private property, you can call the cops on lingering gang members that are not shopping or using the library or any other property functions [maybe a small rec area that isn’t full of dealers and junkies?]
Perhaps you could also buy up land and build or renovate a few buildings and rent the apartments to employees and other locals who want to better themselves. You could also look into sponsoring school departments that have had their funding cut, music department, art department, language classes, books for the school library and new text books. See what would benefit the school. Fund a ‘chair’ in each department.
Well, uh, today’s nice areas are also yesterday’s ghettos. Manhattan is full of multi-million dollar apartments in areas that, twenty years ago, were unsafe even in daylight. So I guess you are going to be giving credit to the “ghetto dwellers” for their hand in New York’s urban revival, right?
I’m assuming that “ghetto” is a euphemism for poor, urban, heavily black population, welfare, single moms, high incarceration rates, drug dealers ect. Rolling into a ghetto and instituting a healthy cheap grocery will result in a grocery that has very few customers and people annoyed that you’re not selling the products that they want. Many of the previous suggestions in this thread talk about fundamentally changing cultural and social aspects that have existed for years- which may not be a bad idea- but is not something that happens simply because of money or the goodheartedness of an outsider. I think the best approach would be to somehow determine how to give hope to people who feel very excluded from the present social system, to show that your efforts are long-term (you won’t back out when the first five projects fail) and that you will work with the community- not at the community.
Sadly, I teach many kids who have a shot at ‘fixing’ their lives via education and still can’t be bothered to show up for their 4-our-a-day school regularly. It takes a lot more than eager teachers and a nice school to fix these problems…I’m willing to be what Amasia says is right.
From a chicken and egg perspective IMO The core “origin” problem of most ghettos is not the lack of community services, medical care, or affordable food, (although those circumstances are a result), but multi-generational poverty and the attitudes that go along with it, in that the people are typically low skill, poorly educated, have limited employment prospects and as a result have relatively little income.
You can artificially introduce subsidized low skill job opportunities, subsidized lower cost food, and subsidized medical services, but none of those are going to really change the people or their economic options long term unless there is some sort of fairly powerful social engineering tied to these benefits to coerce them to change their attitudes and improve their education and skill levels to make them more employable outside the subsidized bubble you have created.
Otherwise, once the magic money is gone, it’s back to ground zero.
Also, just a a reality check the notion that the ghetto dwellers will be romping in self actualizing, well behaved delight throughout this garden of subsidized services is about as naive as the notion that the Iraqis would be throwing flowers at our feet when we came to liberate them. Ghetto culture is often cynical, feral, predatory and dangerous. Unless you have the economic horsepower to guarantee security across a large swath of the area you wish to improve it’s going to be a lot more involved and dangerous than just plunking down several nice buildings and clinics.
One thing outside money can do is fund schools. Reduce class sizes, re-institute the arts and sports programs, offer more after school programs. Anything that will help get kids involved and interested in school is good. It doesn’t have to be a pretty building. It’s not a magic bullet, and you’re still going to have lots of kids that just don’t care, but we can be reasonably sure it will do more good than harm.
Then napalm it is.
I think you are right- to a point. Obviously kids should have access to functional, healthy educational environments, and there’s no reason that a kid growing up in Anacostia should have less opportunity to learn the oboe than a kid growing up in Fairfax. Except that a school is fundamentally a reflection of the community. If you have a beautiful building, amazing resources and passionate teachers, but parents don’t emphasize education and kids don’t go to the school, it’s useless. A few rockstars may break through the system, but in terms of actually transforming a poor area into a reasonable community, it’s not a strong answer. I know there are a number of teachers on this board who can speak to this better than I can, but every person I’ve known that worked in a poor, urban setting as a teacher has ultimately quit because of feeling like they are fighting the parents and an anti-educational culture- not because of pay or lack of resources or any of those things.
Exactly. That’s why I said it’s not a magic bullet, just the best thing I know of that money can reliably accomplish. And honestly I suspect a new or beautiful building helps all that much - if anything I’d think it just emphasizes that it’s not really part of the community and doesn’t belong to the students. Put the money into hiring teachers and reducing class sizes instead. Even in the solidly middle class district where my husband subs he’s encountering classes with thirty to forty students. (A reasonable size is more like twenty. I’ve heard horror stories of impoverished districts where class sizes regularly hit sixty.) You can’t teach when you have to spend the entire time enforcing discipline.
No, but creating a magical fairyland in the middle of ghetto where a select population of poorly educated, low skill people can have a few of the rudiments of a middle class lifestyle isn’t really going to accomplish much in terms of making them more effective economic actors in the long run. It will make their lives marginally less miserable while the money lasts, and if that’s the main goal then mission accomplished.
In real terms in confronting households where there is multi generational poverty unless you are literally prepared to take the absurdly draconian step of taking ghetto kids away from their parents and placing them in middle class homes or somehow raising them away from their parents nothing will really change much.
IIRC the latest researchindicates that reducing class sizes is not really all that effective in improving educational performance.
In some ways, modern ghettos are a demonstration of the law of unintended consequences.
A couple of generations ago, de jure and de facto segregation forced almost all black people to live in black communities. So you had black neighbourhoods where black professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, and businessmen were forced to live alongside poor and working class black people. Segregation kept the professionals down but at the same time they were lifting their communities up.
Then segregation ended, which was a good thing. But one consequence was that black people no longer had to live in all-black communities. They could reside in neighbourhoods based on their economic status rather than their race. Nowadays black doctors and lawyers live in upper class neighbourhoods, middle class black people live in middle class neighbourhoods, and the only people left in the old black communities are the ones who were too poor to get out of them.
I don’t automatically equate ghetto with black. Flint is the only city I’ve ever lived in or near and gotten to know well that has what I’d describe as true ghetto neighborhoods. Most are black (makes sense since over 60% of the city population is black, including plenty of black professionals and non-ghetto black folks) and it’s fairly segregated. But some of the really awful neighborhoods are primarily white.
even sven, you must live in a better class of ghettos than the ones in Flint! The Flint library gets quite a lot of use, but my impression is that library regulars are not typically the folks who live in the ghetto-y areas. As you say: retired people, folks from the non-ghetto demographic, some students.
Drug dealing is a 24/7 activity…parks in the city are not used that much by kids playing. When I lived in the city, a nearby park had a nice playground and trails…I lived two blocks away and for about 5 years took the dogs on almost daily walks there. Rarely did I see anyone using the playground, dog walkers were uncommon. And that was one of the nicer/safer parks in the city. (Kearsley Park, FTR.) The parks on the north end - no way. Feral teenagers and drug addicts, roaming pit bulls, dog carcasses dumped by fighters, that’s about it.
Really, I think the most important thing, and probably the only thing that will make any difference at all, is anything that promotes responsible parenting, early childhood development, after-school activities and daycare. That’s assuming that parents will make the effort. Many won’t. Because I think once the unschooled, unparented kids hit their teenage years, very few will be able to straighten out.
Function follows form in some regards. Fix the buildings and infrastructure, Plant trees, hire a small group of “janitorial staff” to keep down trash, gang grafitti, and litter. Combine this with a strong community outreach program that helps the citizens take back their neighborhoods. Offer renovated empty business space to young self starters at no cost for the first year provided they are on a program that is saving part of their income against having to pay rent the following year. Combine this program with a tax break for the owners of the property to offset the cost of the rent. Raise rents gradually until they are at proper level for the space and neighborhood. Improve the school, offer limited services infant and toddler daycare, put a huge bank of computers with good internet access in the library.
Enhance any existing green space. Light dark spaces.
Seek out a trusted elder of the community, and work anonymously through them, starting immediately. Money for a college education for this family, a job for this teenager, put groceries on tables, etc. Every recipient sworn to secrecy.
Turn the local schools into private, high performance academies, initially excluding resident’s children, due to be bused to another shitty school. Only to have it overturned and all neighbourhood children admitted without cost.
Enhance community with sports fields, well maintained and guarded. Community centre with day care, library, public meeting spaces.
With these four things, you could act swiftly and, I think, make effective change that requires little dependence or red tape. Self replicating and supporting maybe.
If you pay above market, you will get job applicants from outside the ghetto. So you are going to have to pass over better qualified employees in favor of local ones. Then when the local ones show up late for work, or not at all, you can either fire them and hire better people not from the 'hood, or retain them so that you are under-staffed and overpaid, and thus teach those who do show up that good work performance is irrelevant to job success.
Good idea on the security guards - you are going to get a lot - a LOT - of shoplifting. Somehow you are going to have to be sure your security guards are from the 'hood, but not themselves gangbangers.
Somehow you will need to figure out how to stop people from buying your subsidized, below-break-even goods and reselling them.
Which no one will buy.
And watch them walk past to the local Mickey D’s.
My folks’ church did something like this, when the grocery store across the street closed down. They tried running it as a co-op. It lasted less than a year - nobody bought the healthy food, nobody showed up to work when they were supposed to, and they lost their revenues to robbery and shoplifting.
Regards,
Shodan
Perhaps this is an extremely naive idea, but I’ll throw it in there because I’ve seen some small scale attempts at this in my own community. (My neighborhood is adjacent to what has been traditionally known as a ghetto, but is gentrifying somewhat.)
What about community gardens in these open, abandoned-lot type spaces?
•People in the neighborhood can eat anything they want out of these gardens as long as they have put in a few hours helping out with watering, weeding, planting, plowing, composting, harvesting, whatever.
•The otherwise unemployed and shiftless could at least spend some time learning a new skill (that could result in better being able to feed themselves and their families) and could have something to show for it at the end of the day (fresh veggies!).
•The community garden provides access to cheap (free if you do the work) wholesome, healthy food that might otherwise be priced unreasonably in a neighborhood grocery store.
•People learn ways to provide for themselves.
Remember 100 years ago, when not everyone lived in an urban jungle and just about everyone had a garden and/or maybe a couple of chickens or something? There was a homeless/ghetto problem, but people could get work as a hired hand on a farm, sleep in the barn, move along to something else. But as long as there was space to plant, families didn’t have to starve (notwithstanding outlier situations like the Dust Bowl thing in the 1930s).
I was just thinking of my own grandparents, from small towns in Ohio. They didn’t have a lot of money and would be considered poor to maybe lower-middle class by today’s standards. They had four kids. All four went to college and the three boys all spent time in military service. There was always a garden and there were chickens for years. They might not have been able to provide steaks once a week, but there were always fresh fruits and veggies and usually meat in the form of chicken.
It takes a lot of work to create and maintain a garden space. That’s something productive to do for anyone in the community who is interested in taking some fresh veggies home at the end of the day. People used to live like this a long time ago – helping each other out on their farms and bartering resources. It seems logical to provide education in some way to help people get back to that. The urban/suburban lifestyle isn’t sustainable unless adults have some sort of dependable, reliable employment. So, step back and take a few notes from back in the day when dependable, reliable employment was even harder to come by (1930s). How did people survive? They cooperated with each other, bartered, and traded. There was no social safety net like welfare, back then, which makes it so much easier to cash that monthly check and just go buy plastic, frozen, processed blocks of “food.”
What say ye? Seriously, I am not some 80-year-old codger wistfully pining away for the “good old days.” But I have participated in some co-op farming/community garden activities and have tried to help educate people on how to grow and preserve their own food. I just can’t guess at how effective programs like that are in really depressed communities like Flint.
Then that church was doing something horribly wrong. There are a number of food coops in Indianapolis, in some pretty terrible neighborhoods, that are extremely successful. NONE of your stereotypes fit.
The studies mentioned in the Wiki article all seem to deal with whether or not small classes (~20) are more effective than traditional classes of ~30. None of them seem to look into the impact of having classes with 40+ students and one teacher.