These things vary state by state - Ilinois gives preference to pregnant women and those with children. Single, childless adults go to the back of the line. As I was single and had no children… Likewise, no free school lunches, no childcare vouchers, etc. for me.
This is not making some sort of point or some sort of dig against anyone.
I’ve visited the U.S. pretty often but obviously there are a hell of a lot of things that I cant understand not being a native.
Do wealthy Afro Americans live side by side with wealthy white people ?
Do they have the same outlook on things?
What I mean is,is it a case of" us rich people",(not me I hasten to add)regardless of our racial background think the same about general subjects or do Afros and Caucasians identify with their communities,or is there a seperate sub sector of wealthy AAs and wealthy CCs?
Do rich Americans identify with the wealth or the race of other people ?
I’m sorry I havent put this better and I hope no one jumps in with racism or communism,I ask this question out of genuine curiousity whichI hope will be answered in the spirit in which it was meant.
Depends on how you define “wealthy”. There are certainly some integrated neighborhoods with blacks and whites of similar socio-economic level living side by side, including some upper class neighborhoods.
There are also a lot of neighborhoods that are still totally segregated.
Depends on the topic.
Just as white neighborhoods may be sharply divided between poor and wealthy, so too “Afros” will divide into poor and wealthy neighborhoods, with the majority (in both cases) being less well off. And it’s not unknown for blacks to want to keep their neighborhood black, just as many whites want to keep theirs wholly white. And generally of the same class as the locals, too.
Wealthy people generally have no more desire to associate with poor of their own race as poor of any other race, whether those wealthy are black or white.
Both.
“wealthy blacks” is a subset of “wealthy Americans”, and “wealthy whites” is another subset, although a far larger one.
If we’re talking about wealthy wealthy black people, then yes, they probably live next to (or not that far from) similarly wealthy white people. If only because there are only a few places that truly wealthy people live.
But if you’re talking about middle and upper-middle class black people, not necessarily. My own parents live in a McMansion subdivision that’s all black, surrounded by an area that’s predominately black. I like to kid around and say the area is “bougie”–a term I like to use for snobbish, conservative, well-to-do-or-at-least-trying-to-look-like-it black people. I think there’s a misconception that such places don’t exist for blacks…that we’re all either living in ugly inner cities or trying to blend in with white people in predominately white neighborhoods. Not true.
If you mean to ask if black people with money are just like white people with money, the answer is no.
What happened to you is sad, and I agree that the systems that we have in place are inadequate to take care of situations like yours where the joblessness is a short term situation or where the problems are caused by inadequate health care, however, this still doesn’t answer my question or what we are debating which is do those poor have a right to be able to live in Chicago even if they can’t afford to? Should the city of Chicago create more housing projects for the poor and increase benefits if the result of that would be to attact more poor to the city centers?
What if a person can’t afford to live anywhere? Should we force them out onto the streets to freeze to death in winter?
Shouldn’t the city of Chicago find a means to house those who already live in the city rather than forcing their poor to other communities with fewer resources and money than the 3rd largest city in the nation?
How do they differ?
For those who can’t afford to live anywhere, we have the hodgepodge of social services and homeless shelters. Our system is incredibly flawed, however within the confines of this system, I don’t see why the urban centers, should be the ones who warehouse the poor with large shelters or why they should be the ones who have to “take care” of them. Also, some of them might be better off in other communities where there are more job opportunities.
The problem is that such communities are often short of dirt-cheap housing.
Which are filled to overflowing and inadequate to meet demands.
- the only poor Chicago is being asked to take care of (at least I hope that’s what’s happening - “warehouse” is a terrible, terrible concept here) are those that are already in the city. We’re not talking about importing poor people, for goodness sake!
- shelters are shit beyond a temporary measure - people need a stable residence. Also, good luck getting a job if you don’t have a permanent address. Hence the need for low-income housing rather that just shelters.
- many people (including myself) moved to Chicago because the job opportunities are richer there than elsewhere. (Until last month I was still working in Chicago, even though I live in Indiana)
- mass transit is better in Chicago, greatly reducing the cost of transporting oneself to work. (In fact, despite living in Indiana, I rode mass transit to my job in the Chicago Loop for 10 years because even coming from another state it’s cheaper - but my monthly transit pass cost 4 times as much living here as when I was in Chicago)
- the surrounding suburbs typically have less of all of the above - shelters, low income housing, transit, etc. It is wrong to force poor people out of one city into another city even less capable of helping them.
See, your attitude is basically selfish and short-sighted. Your solution is to take your poor neighbors and make them someone else’s problem. To hell with any sort of community - not to mention that it’s in your own self interest to have a safety net in place in case YOU’RE the next victim of circumstance. Very, very few people truly are capable of bootstrapping themselves from a house fire, flood, other natural disaster, and so forth. Unless you don’t mind being exiled in such events…?
I think that you are implying motives to what I am saying that just aren’t there. If anything, I would say that your approach is shortsighted. By making the same type of housing projects as we have made historically, all we are doing is warehousing the poor, because ultimately, that was what Cabrini Green was, a place to stick the poor out of sight and ultimately out of mind. The other drawback to creating these projects is that you create large zones that the middle class avoids. In other words, we recreate the same scenario as happened in various U.S. cities in the 60s through the 80s where the middle class, both black and white, fled the city to live in the suburbs. The urban center is left for the most part with incredibly stratified neighborhoods for the most part, either poor or rich and the middle class is in the suburbs. The city then has much less in the way of tax revenues, and those projects which were built with so much hopes aren’t well maintained.
The point that you seem to be missing is that I am not saying that we need to eradicate all of the housing for the poor or even that we shouldn’t have some sort of temporary assistance for people who lose their jobs and need help paying the mortgage or paying rent. My point is that what we need to avoid are large concentrations of poverty in the city which is ultimately what you seem to arguing for.
The positive thing about gentrification is that you bring in more people to the city and you can broaden the tax base of the city. I live in DC which if anything experienced the worst of the middle class flight because DC doesn’t have a state to help support it. When the middle class left, those tax revenues were lost to the city and ultimately, it couldn’t afford to maintain itself. Ultimately most people would rather not live near a housing project if they can afford not to.
What I would rather see is something along the lines of Hope VI housing which has a mix of market rate housing and subsidized housing. The problem with this type of housing is that it doesn’t have the same density as the large scale types of projects like Cabrini Green and therefore the city simply won’t have the same number of housing units available for the poor. The other option is to force developers to set aside a certain proportion of units for subsidized housing. Again, you just don’t generate the same number of units as the large scale project.
Because what happens is that the middle class will simply flee into the suburbs and wash their hands of the city as happened in the past. It is better to have some units available for people of limited means and try to keep things set up so that we don’t have too much stratification.
The point that I am trying to argue is that none of us have an inherent right to live where we want to if we can’t afford to. I couldn’t afford to buy a home in the neighborhood that I grew up in because I was priced out. A single family home is running about $600 to 800K right now. I live in a gentrifying neighborhood which leaves me with a rather different view of gentrification.
NOWHERE AM I ADVOCATING A RETURN TO HIGH RISE WAREHOUSES!!!
(and you accuse me of implying motives?)
The major flaw in the “new” Chicago housing for the poor concept is in not REPLACING the housing removed by tearing down those high rises. THAT is the crux of the issue - the politicians are saying “oh, we’re getting rid of the hellholes” but they aren’t providing a replacement. Is that such a hard concept to grasp? That leaves the poor with two choices: 1) the street or 2) go elsewhere (become someone else’s problem)
Nonesense. We are BOTH in agreement that concentrating the poor is a bad idea. Hell, the wealthy cram themselves into highrises - often with smaller apartments than were in the projects - but don’t seem to turn them into pestilent festering den of misery. Why is that? Obviously, poverty + density = Bad Idea.
The downside is that is can force out the poor and displace longterm residents - they become someone else’s problem, except no one else wants them.
No - just the Federal government.
The worst middle class flight was Detroit - it now has 1/6 the population it did in 1970. Everyone got the hell out of the city and the state did nothing to help it.
- Then build more mixed-income housing
- Section 8 allows for voucher for the subsidized to find housing in private complexes without “forcing” any private landlord to set aside anything or, in most cases, to lose money. (Granted not all landlords are willing, but hey, it’s voluntary)
- Chicago has an enormous footprint - 220 square miles. There are many areas that could be rebuilt to mixed-income housing. In fact, both River North and Printer’s Row were largely abandoned commerical areas that are now trendy housing. If private enterprise could find the space, why not a private-public partnership? Why can’t the city build in these areas, too?
The highrises replaced low-density neighborhoods, which is one reason the poor became so concentrated. We need to reverse that. Even if impoverished, a low-density neighborhood is usually much more livable than a high-rise project.
But it’s OK to simply push some other people out into the street with NO housing because SOME people now have a place to live? I’m sorry, I don’t find that an acceptable compromise. There is no reason we can’t house everyone other than a lack of will to do so and selfish unwillingness to allocate the money. How many housing units could have been built for the price of Millenium Park? The city had lots of parks - I argue that mixed-income housing would have been a better use of the money, which ran into hundreds of millions of dollars.
As I said - where does that leave those who can’t afford to live anywhere? Do you leave them to freeze on the sidewalk in winter? What do you do when there are tens of thousands of people who, even if they do have jobs, can’t afford the market rate even for a slum apartment? (Because that’s where folks on minimum wage are in Chicago and suburbs - you can’t afford to live anywhere on your income)
Caffeine-addict writes:
> I live in DC which if anything experienced the worst of the middle class flight
> because DC doesn’t have a state to help support it.
Not by a long shot. Even in the early 1970’s, when suburbanization was at its height and gentrification was only starting, Washington had lots of nice neighborhoods full of well-off and mostly white people. There were other cities that suffered more from suburbanization (i.e., white flight).
From what I understand from friends who are landlords and people I know who deal with residential housing, getting paid from HUD can be rather tricky and they don’t always cover the market rate. In a hot market and in a desirable location, this often means that landlords simply won’t take Section 8. N.B., the friends who were landlords got out because it became too much trouble to deal with and they sold when the market was stronger.
Of course, getting the city to do anything is always a challenge.
These are generally better but again you’ll find that getting these things built boils down to a political issue. And from what I’ve seen, generally people support things like homeless shelters and housing for the poor so long as they are in someone else’s neighborhood. At this point, it becomes a political problem.
My original point was not that housing for poor is an intrinsic bad, but that in the suburbs, they may have a shot at getting some mixed use housing built and find more affordable properties that might take Section 8.
I understand that they like to live in Chicago and that they have better access to public transport. However, from your post, you still had access to public transportation in the suburb you moved to.
Oh. Huh. Well, there’s our communication problem, then. Caffeine.addict wasn’t the only one who thought that’s what you were advocating; I did too. I henceforth amend my interpretations of your arguments.
Yeah, absolutely. Chicago could offer tax incentives or some sort of kick-back to developers who put in, say 15% Section-8 housing in every new building. That would be 1 or 2 units in a 6 flat or 12 unit, and that sounds reasonable. For all I know, they’re doing this already, I have no idea.
I didn’t say that Chicago shouldn’t do everything I expect of it’s surrounding suburbs - that is, make some affordable and Section 8 housing available within more affluent areas. I do think Chicago should do that too. That addresses all the ideals about “inspiration”, or simply the lack of despair in the air. I just don’t have hard numbers, and I was under the assumption that having four low-low-income units on each block wouldn’t be enough to absorb all the need, or that you wouldn’t be able to coerce Chicago landlords into such a thing*. I was accepting that spreading it out would be necessary.
*because of the housing cost difference. I could see getting my old landlord in Tinley to lose a $700 rent out of the kindness of her wizened dried out shell of a heart (or, y’know, her tax rebates); I have a harder time imagining it of the guy who makes $1200 monthly off me right now, or Og forbid, the $3000-5000 rents in some neighborhoods. Can Chicago afford to make it worth the while for a landlord to lose the much larger rent in Chicago than a suburban landlord would lose? And can they do it multiplied by the brazzillion people who need a place? What about those, like you, who move *into *town (you can say it’s just about the people who are already here, but we have no city wall to keep people out, and the ones that are already here insist on breeding!) And can we do it and still keep kid’s health insurance intact (a much sexier talking point for re-election, y’know)?
Problem is, expensive housing and job opportunities tend to go hand in hand. Lots of job opportunities is something that makes a community attractive, and therefore drives up the cost of housing.
Another problem is that communities with high housing costs need low-income people. There are toilets to be cleaned, tables to be waited, and all sorts of low-wage jobs that need doing in those areas. The choice for the community is to either require that all jobs pay a living wage, subsidize housing, or deal with lots of people commuting in and out of the community every day. None of those approaches are free of problems.
I was thinking of “the bad old days” of Marion Barry and when Congress took over. Anyhow, all of those neighborhoods were west of 14th Street NW.
Whats interesting to me is that one of my neighbors in NE says that crime didn’t get really bad until the early to mid 90s.
While those are valid point, getting paid from NON-Section 8 residents can also be tricky. I’m not a landlord, but at times I have worked clean-up for them after tenants move out - let me tell you, poor people have no monopoly on being in arrears or decorating the place in “early septic tank” (the two worst to come to mind are the one where the dogs were never let out of the front room and, being living creatures, crapped and pissed in there, having no choice; and the idiot who started a compost heap in her dining room which was almost as bad as the Dog Room). But let’s not get distracted. My original point was not that housing for poor is an intrinsic bad, but that in the suburbs, they may have a shot at getting some mixed use housing built and find more affordable properties that might take Section 8.
It’s not a matter of whether or not they like Chicago - it’s because, believe it or not, some suburbs are more expensive to live in than the lower-income Chicago areas even excluding the old projects. That mass transit I use in my 'burb? You need a car to get to it. In Chicago you don’t need a car. I lived without a car for 8 years by choice, and it’s not usual to find upper class people who don’t own cars who live in the inner city in Chicago - probably the only place outside of NYC where that happens in this country. (When a car is needed you rent one, if you have a license - I’ve known a dozen or so healthy, employed adults from Chicago who simply never bothered to get one.)
Did you ever see the movie Blues Brothers? Remember that ridiculous one-room “apartment” they were in briefly? Chicago used to have lots of places like that which, while not great, at least got you out of the cold, had a lock on the door, gave you a place to keep your stuff, and an address. Those are all gone now, in the name of “improvement” - and granted they weren’t good things but those they used to shelter are, by and large, living in shelters or on the street. Again, the city tore something down and didn’t replace it. Yes, politics are a big problem in this, that and people willing to pay for more parks and flowers down street medians before the needs of the most needy in the region.
I’ve read many a time that the huge decline in SROs is a major contributor to homelessness. Not sure that is the result of state action, tho.
I believe that it’s the result of neighborhoods not supporting the existance of SROs. There is one a few blocks from me that will probably need to close because of space considerations. Although everyone in town SAYS we need to have the SRO housing available, everyone seems to be a NIMBY-er when it comes to finding a place to move it. And I live in one of the most liberal communities in the Chicago area…if they can’t get people to support an SRO here, I can’t imagine the trouble they have in other types of neighborhoods.
And, yeah, I have to admit, having the SRO for a neighbor isn’t my favorite thing about where I live, but you know, when you live in a town that celebrates “diversity,” it shouldn’t all be about the color of a person’s skin.