The ghetto as a whole? No.
Individual people living in a ghetto? Yes. Find the ones who want a better life and are willing to do what they have to do on their end to get it and give 'em whatever they need to get out.
This is actually probably the best solution put forward so far.
astro - you missed my point.
Belief is the important thing. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is any possibility for a person to escape poverty.
What matters is whether a person believes it is worthwhile to try.
What happens to people who come from poverty - and I speak from personal experience here - is that all of the things you can’t have are paraded before your eyes, until you lose any hope that there is any point in making an effort. If you spend your entire formative years being told you’re worthless, and having it beaten into you, then it’s quite difficult to feel positive about your chances.
These people do not feel that they have a chance. Whether you think they have a chance is irrelevant. They are not refusing opportunities, they are refusing to waste their time and energy on something that they are sure will be a waste of time. That, at least, is how they see it.
Yes, sometimes people do escape from that background. Most don’t.
If anyone wants to help people out of poverty, the most important thing that needs to be done is to give people a real belief that they can better themselves. And you have to make it believable to people who have been pushed around and marginalised and abused and blamed for their entire lives.
Or, you know, you could just dismiss them as “lazy”.
Shakester, are you talking about adults or kids? Because I can assure you that teenagers are most definitely lazy.
Did I say there is no such thing as laziness?
Nope, I didn’t. So what makes you think that’s what I was saying?
My point is that “laziness” as an explanation of why there is long-term unemployment and welfare dependency and all of the other evils that beset people at the poor end of society is, frankly, offensively stupid. It’s victim-blaming.
That doesn’t mean I think that there is never any kind of laziness anywhere ever.
In the Twin Cities?
One problem with the Twin Cities is that the co-op market is pretty saturated - and coops don’t tend to appeal to lower socio-economic classes. They have a niche - the folks that shop there aren’t rich (those folks go to Whole Foods), but they tend to be well educated, white. AND groceries in general, and coops in particular, are NOT easy to run. There is an incredible amount of waste and loss
But Mississippi Market has done really well on the “ghetto” corner of Selby and Dale and Seward has outgrown two buildings (and its third was built to small) in liberal hippie Seward, right outside of Phelps. Both hire from the neighborhood and neither has significant labor issues. (Disclosure, I have a good friend on the Seward board and am a ten year member of Mississippi Market). However, I don’t think either has managed - despite the best of intentions - to really appeal to their disadvantaged “ghetto” neighbors.
Phelps itself is an interesting experiment in helping a ghetto neighborhood. The Franklin Street bakery had been fairly successful building there and putting jobs into the neighborhood, I haven’t followed it since the economic downturn though. That’s one thing that is needed - low skill but worthwhile labor. A lot of money has gone into Franklin between Cedar and Lyndale - I lived along there 25 years ago in college - and the streets ARE cleaner, there ARE fewer obvious drug deals happening on corners - and it hasn’t been a gentrification.
There are things the greater society can (and should) do for people at the margins, and I m not too impressed with current conservative positions on this, but to expect that (American society in this case) should be responsible in some fashion for people’s personal lack of faith in themselves is turning the nanny state dial up to 11.
On a slightly tangential note please elaborate for me how ghetto residents in the US have been “pushed around” and “abused” and by whom. Who specifically is doing this to them? How exactly are they being pushed around and abused? Who is on the other end of that pushing and abusing hand?
I don’t blame you guys for showing your bitterness. I was once a pot smoking young liberal, too, living a sheltered life with rose colored glasses. Getting a glimpse of the real world was a horrible culture shock that I’m still reeling from!
One big problem is that you can’t know what you don’t know that you don’t know.
Let’s take the SAT. If you are like most middle-class people, you probably went into high school knowing that at some point you were going to take the SAT. When you were in your sophomore year, your parents probably bought you a couple of SAT prep books and would bug you now and then to study them. When you have questions about the test process or the types of questions out there, your parents give you advice. They probably shared some of their stories, as well. As the test approaches, it becomes a hot topic for stressed-out juniors. You and your friend chat about your test nervousness, how dumb the analogy problems are, what schools want what scores, etc. And then you guys all go through the hell of college applications, maybe look for some scholarships, and go on with your lives.
Let’s look at me- and this isn’t whining, it all worked out in the end. I had vaguely heard somewhere that the SAT was something that you had to do for college, but I didn’t really know when or how it worked. Nobody in my family (heck, nobody I knew) had ever taken one (or any standardized test), so I didn’t really have anyone to give me the rundown. I’d never taken a look at the “test prep” section of the bookstore (why would I have?) so I wasn’t aware that test-prep materials even existed.
In the beginning of my junior year, I had the luck of having a very good honors English teacher who took it upon herself to make sure we were signed up. Otherwise, I very well might have missed the deadlines. I had no idea how people got into college. I had a great uncle who went to college, and my mom had worked a bit towards a degree at the local community college and later transferred to the state school. But she never did the college application thing. I had a few “How to Get into College” books, but they didn’t really make much sense to me because I didn’t have much context. Applying for college felt like signing up for a penpal in Moldova or sending away for a mail order bride…it was some weird thing I’d gotten it in my head to do, that nobody I knew had ever done, I was doing it by myself and I didn’t really know what to expect.
A handful of us at school took the test at a school on the other side of town one Saturday morning- SAT prep wasn’t a topic of conversation at my school or anything. I didn’t know what a “good” score was or what colleges were looking for. I applied to a single neat-looking state school, got in, and that was that. Looking back, I had good grades and high SAT scores and could have probably gotten a scholarship at a better school.
It hit me like bricks when I was applying to grad school and my new set of upper middle class friends were applying to places like Georgetown and Yale…I realized “Holy shit! Wait a minute…those places aren’t sacred ground! My As and GRE score are the same as theirs…I can apply to those places too!.” And I did- and am now happily working away in a great program. But that only happened because I was in a milieu where sending off an application to Harvard was an ordinary, unremarkable event.
In the end, kids are lazy. What class does is change the consequences of laziness. If an upper-middle class kid is lazy in high school, he’s going to be stuck with a lame internship at the place where his Dad works instead of interning on Capitol Hill like his better motivated buddies. If a poor kid is lazy, she’s spending summer working a dead end minimum wage job that doesn’t contribute at all to her career development- hell, she might even end up that way if she is motivated as well.
Do you really think law enforcement and the justice system treats people the same in a ghetto versus the good side of town?
Who’s going to get noticed more when they go down to the city council meeting? LaShawn from Poortown, complaining about the trash on the streets. Or Lauren from Richville, complaining about the dead tree at the end of her block?
If LaShawn gets shot and killed on her way home from the council meeting, how much time is the news going to focus on her personal story and the hunt for her killer, versus Lauren’s.
I worked at Six Flags as a teenager. If you were a teen in the metro Atlanta area and you needed a job, Six Flags was the go-to spot. It was just known that if you were applying and you attended specific “ghetto” schools, you needed to lie on your application. It wasn’t race-based what constituted “ghetto”; it was strictly geographical. How much of this perception was based on reality and how much to irrational fear, I don’t know. But it’s an example of how the stigma of being labeled “ghetto” impacted behavior.
Everyone who has ever acted on class-based prejudice “pushes and abuses” ghetto people.
Well, for starters, over the years I have worked for half a dozen different businesses where a hiring manager or the boss flat out states “I won’t hire anyone who lives in X”, where X is a housing project or “bad neighborhood”. If people won’t even consider you because of your address I’d call that “pushed around and abused”.
My last five years in corporate America I ran into two managers who told me they’d never hire someone who graduated from a public high school, even if they had a college degree from an Ivy League university. Basically, if your parents couldn’t afford private schooling from kindergarten on you’re trash. Which, by the way, also eliminated a lot of middle class people from the hiring process but whatever.
Those are just two examples of how people who grow up poor/in the ghetto are at a disadvantage in the hiring market regardless of their ability or attitude.
When you’re judged solely on your address it’s not really fair, especially for someone young enough they haven’t been able to leave home for a different address.
The evidence that the poor and ghetto-dwellers are discriminated against is out there if you just take the blinders off.
I think unproductivity breeds lazy. You get into habits, patterns, bad ideas, negativity. Sometimes despair can turn into a form of lazy (often labeled as “anxiety and depression”). I say this because I’m one of those people. I have a to do list that I haven’t gotten to because it’s so freaking exhausting thinking about it. it’s not major, but my life is always upside down and I’m often scared to leave my house. So I think, “Who cares if I have spare computer parts in my closet? Shit sucks anyway.”
I have a friend who had a mental breakdown and left corporate accounting 8 years ago. EIGHT. He plays poker for a living. He can’t seem to get back into the real world because what started as a legit mental illness is now, “I can’t imagine ever working 40 hours a week and getting up at 6am.” This is someone who is incredibly smart and would’ve otherwise been successful. He calls himself lazy and I’m always trying to phrase it as something else, but come on. He doesn’t want to work. (He gets no disability. He was rejected. He does get low income health care benefits, though, which I’m jealous of.)
He has no idea what he’ll do for retirement or what he’s going to do now that the poker game is changing. His only plan is to die before he gets too old.
What I’m saying is that kids aren’t equipped to be 30 year olds. So what happens is we put it all on them to make all the right decisions and to be able to see the life ahead of them if they don’t. It’s not fair. So yeah, it’s laziness in a way. Not for all, but for enough. Too many of these kids have moms with part time jobs that drink all the time, love their boyfriends more than their children and never wake up before 11am.
What we do is ask teens to go against their natural tendencies and be excessively responsible. Face it: A black kid isn’t likely to make it in this world without being exceptional.
Or:
John who complains about the re-ghettofication of his gentrified neighborhood.
No, in Milwaukee. And it was thirty or so years ago. The church I grew up in, where my parents met, married, and where all their children were baptized and confirmed used to be in a working class neighborhood, which could now be considered a ghetto.
That depends on what you mean by “the jobs being there for them”. Some 18 year old with two kids is not employable in the same sense that the average 18 year old is.
That’s certainly true, but it isn’t something the government can force you to believe.
Because it rachets one way. If you believe you can make it out of poverty, and work at not being poor for years, it is possible that you will still be poor at the end of it. If you don’t believe it, it is certain.
And I think you and astro are sort of talking past each other. If you make a job available to the 18 year old mother I mentioned, with subsidized child care and a living wage and so forth, and it is based on government subsidies, it will last (as astro mentions) as long as the subsidies do. Maybe she will learn some job skills and be able to find a real job when the subsidies dry up. But a subsidized job isn’t a long term solution to unemployment. And I doubt very much that we can change our economy such that a high school dropout can get a job in a factory and support him/herself and a family, as was allegedly the case back in the 40s and 50s. That train has left the station, and it isn’t coming back.
Regards,
Shodan
Oh, and again: You can’t help a ghetto neighborhood without taking some of the ghetto out of it. That means gang intervention, prevention, and more police. Giving gangbangers access to better dentists and healthy food won’t fix the problem.
Can I ask which neighborhood? My mom is from Milwaukee and she says the same thing.
35th and Garfield, if that means anything. Right off of North Avenue.
Regards,
Shodan
Go to any community college, and you might be surprised that there are few 18-22 year olds around. Low-income adults improving their job skills are one of the largest markets in higher education. Lots of people in the “ghetto” go to college, although not in the ways that middle class people tend to. It’s often part-time, career focused community college work.
The idea of a static ghetto of permanently non-working people is a myth. Most poor people in the US will only be poor for short period of their life. The majority of Americans aged 25-75 will spend at least one year, for one reason or another, below the poverty line. Most poverty happens when people are young- incomes generally rise as people get older and get to a better point in their career. 42% of people born into the bottom quintile of US income move up to a higher quintile. Back when welfare existed, half of families receiving AFDC benefits got off welfare within a year, 70% within two years, and 90% after five years. Put shortly, poverty in America is something that people tend to experience for a short period of their life, usually because of unemployment, and usually when they are young and trying to raise kids.
Just like you and I, poor people start out with crappy jobs or unemployed, build their careers, improve their educations and start making more money. They just start at a lower bar. My mom started out with an unskilled job and built her career and education such that she will retire with a para-professional job. If she had started out with a para-professional job, she’d probably have risen to a professional job. If she had started out on a professional job, she’d probably have risen to the executive level. It just happens to be that the first step on the lowest career level is below the poverty line.
Of course, that can only happen when jobs exist. Creating jobs and making the first rung of the ladder a little less painful would actually do some real good.
So how do you account for ghettos when jobs did exist?
Sure, but we were talking about the ones who stay poor.
Because you are quite correct - most people start at the bottom and rise in income as they age, gain job skills and experience, and so on. That’s the American dream, and for most people, it is a reality. For those folks, we don’t need to do anything special - they manage already.
But there is a hard core of folks who start or become poor and stay that way. That’s the people it seems to be hardest to help, and often they wind up in the ghetto where rent is cheap.
I’ve posted this before, more than once - a poor person who does the following -
[ul][li]Graduate from high school[/li][li]Get married and stay married[/li][li]Don’t have children out of wedlock[/li][li]Get a job - any job - and stick to it for a year, and don’t quit until you have a better job lined up[/ul]has a better than 90% chance of not being poor after five or ten years. I am **not **saying that these things are easy. [/li]
And it is not a guarantee, especially in today’s economy. But there are few guarantees in life, so a smart person plays the percentages.
Or doesn’t, and more often than not, winds up regretting it.
Regards,
Shodan
The one thing you did not mention - jobs.
Jobs. Yeah, and a good grocery store. Some nice public transportation will help. But, basically, jobs. And ownership in the means of production.
Buy the largest most centrally located property in the neighborhood and start a business. Start small and post-industrial - a call center of some sort? Couldn’t be any worse than most of the ones I’ve been shunted to but you will have to invest a lot in training - and do profit sharing with financial statements, teach them financial literacy and maybe gain some trust. Also - let’s be ugly and frank - teach them how to speak like people with power. You become what you pretend to be.
Hire only people with high school degrees, but hold GED classes.
Fire people immediately for theft.
Buy up the surrounding property and fix it up gradually. Charge lower than market but higher than slumlord rents for employees. Start legal action against slumlords who own adjacent properties. Evict people immediately for drugs and vandalism. Except marijuana - let’s be real.
Things are looking up.
Get a community college to hold classes for the employees leading to associate degrees in a limited number of practical fields - business? IT? I really don’t know - but no ‘trade’ schools, like cosmetology and HVAC. Subsidize the classes, but have the employees pay tuition.
Require your contractors who are fixing up the properties to hire apprentices locally. And by apprentice I mean people to haul heavy stuff up three flights of stairs and run to Dunkin Donuts and rinse out paint brushes - no, keep them away from my brushes - and do all the tedious boring cleaning. Then strongly encourage them to take the good ones on crew permanently. Don’t forget to include the girls in this - it’s good money and you need more dexterity than upper body strength for a lot of trades.
Okay, we might have some local investment now.
Start bribing the police. Donate heavily to the equivalent of the Police Benevolent Society. Then bitch like hell when the police to not respond quickly to calls from your neighborhood OR rough up locals unduly. Never post bail for a male employee under 30. Evaluate single mothers on a case by case basis. Help relatives of single fathers get temporary custody.
Do something expensive, obvious, and non-religious for a local church-type building - new roof, new parking, even a paint job. Don’t advertise this and tell the church people not to mention it in service.
Start another business, maybe a designer brewery. Fix up more property. Expand the grocery store. Start a scholarship fund for a four year degree at a state school for employees children. Maybe two, one boy and one girl.
Start a really good store front ethnic restaurant, with good parking and room for expansion. (And ask the local health inspector office to look the place over before you do anything but scrub the floors and walls.) DO NOT TAKE CREDIT until your first good review in the local paper.
This is over the first five or ten years, depending on the local resistance.
However, and this is key, subsidize housing, education, and good food, but pay as little as possible and do profit sharing in all the business.
Now I want to be filthy rich, this could be fun.