# Why do cities often have hellhole ghetto inner cores? Any solution? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 21, 2009, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813 "2009-02-21T03:57:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 14\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/73ab20/32.png) [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tao_s_Revenge)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2009, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/61 "2009-02-22T15:02:04Z")
> [@Chief\_Pedant](#): > > You have confused–or at least conflated–what is innate behaviour and the capacity to learn. > > The maximum capacity to learn something–to understand it and to act on it–is genetic. A chimpanzee might be trained to use simple sign language or use a flush toilet, for instance, but you couldn’t teach it quantum physics and no chimp society is going to develop a more sophisticated golf driver. They probably won’t even get as far as developing decent golf courses. > > What genetics does is create a maximum potential to learn, understand, have insight and so on. And the expression of our human success is obviously influenced as much by our genes as by our environment. The 5 children of the family next door have nearly identical nurturing circumstances. The brightest one is off to be a neurosurgeon–barely got any attention at all because the family’s resources were spent on their neediest child. The least bright one had tutors and special help all through school but still ended up not finishing high school, getting involved with drugs and spending time at the courthouse. I’m sure she learned more than she would have had she not had such extraordinary extra help, but she was never going to learn calculus. The other three are somewhere in between. Genes. Getting involved with drugs is a choice so is dropping out. That had nothing to do with her genetics and all to do with her character and choices. Smart people get involved with drugs and drop out too. The assertion is the ghetto is the ghetto because people are reprogrammed by their genetics to be there. Another thing that assertion fails at is account for street smarts. Street smarts are more EQ based where as academic success is more IQ based. A person can develop either skill set but will usually focus on or the other in my opinion. The ghetto is a very social setting and people there will develop street smarts that make you look like a complete retard. In short the world you personally know isn’t all there is to know about the world. > [@](#): > > The 5 children of the family next door have nearly identical nurturing circumstances. The brightest one is off to be a neurosurgeon–barely got any attention at all Also do you see the oxymoron in your 2 sentences right?🙂 ---
**Author:** ![The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/73ab20/32.png) [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tao_s_Revenge)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2009, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/62 "2009-02-22T15:04:44Z")
> [@brazil84](#): > > For purposes of this discussion, I will define “intelligence” as ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience; as measured by an IQ test or some other test which correlates with an IQ test. > > When you used the word “poverty,” I basically understood it to mean a state of having relatively low income or assets. > > Now will you please answer my question? IQ tests are near complete fail at measuring EQ intelligence, and creativity. Surely if you want an honest debate you’d want a less horribly biased instrument. ---
**Author:** ![Chief\_Pedant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@Chief\_Pedant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chief_Pedant)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2009, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/63 "2009-02-22T17:02:38Z")
> [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](#): > > Getting involved with drugs is a choice so is dropping out. That had nothing to do with her genetics and all to do with her character and choices. Smart people get involved with drugs and drop out too. > > The assertion is the ghetto is the ghetto because people are reprogrammed by their genetics to be there. It’s true that getting involved with drugs is a choice. “Character” is a complex thing but is certainly influenced by genes; this is why children from the same family–the same nurturing environment–have different “character.” And their genes substantially influence their choices. I would be unable to choose to be a quantum physicist or a concert pianist or an NBA star. My genetic makeup leaves me without the potential to achieve those things. And should my genes make me impulsive, or limit my ability to consider long-term consequences or predispose me to addiction, it’s much more likely my “choice” would be to use drugs. The point about 5 children from the same family is that a closely-knit and supportive family becomes a nice control group to demonstrate how much difference genetics make. Same environment; 5 different sets of genes; 5 different kids. > [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](#): > > Another thing that assertion fails at is account for street smarts. Street smarts are more EQ based where as academic success is more IQ based. > A person can develop either skill set but will usually focus on or the other in my opinion. > The ghetto is a very social setting and people there will develop street smarts that make you look like a complete retard. > In short the world you personally know isn’t all there is to know about the world. A common misperception about intelligence is that it can be measured by how well one is able to survive in a particular world. This misperception confuses knowledge and intelligence. Stick Professor Einstein in the Arctic and he might be dead in 8 hours, where an Inuit would experience just another average day. This is not a test for intelligence. It’s a test for local knowledge. “Street smarts” has nothing at all to do with smart. Certainly the expectation would be that if an entire population was highly intelligent they would better be able to control and direct their environment. So if there were droughts and famine, they’d build water systems and food supplies. In that sense, one can look at overall societies and cultures and make rough inferences about average intelligence, but of course many external factors do come in to play (though not as simplistically as those argued for by Jared Diamond). > [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](#): > > **(byCP)** > “\*The 5 children of the family next door have nearly identical nurturing circumstances. The brightest one is off to be a neurosurgeon–barely got any attention at all \*” > > Also do you see the oxymoron in your 2 sentences right?🙂 I do not see the oxymoron. Would you point it out? The point I was making is that the fundamental difference between the success of the brightest child and the failure of the least bright was not nurture and not lack of intervention toward the least bright, but a raw difference in innate intelligence… Finally, it is not true at all that ghettos are simply a function of (lack of) intelligence or poor genetics. There are too many other external factors to consider, and many successful groups have histories that contain a ghetto period for that cohort. My contention is that persistence of an individual or group of individuals in a ghetto condition is related to intelligence for the cohort left behind if others have been able to move out and move ahead. It should be noted that diversity of populations in a ghetto is not some sort of proof that a core contributor is not genetic, and more than the idea that a cohort of otherwise unrelated short people is proof that height is not important for success at basketball. It’s not that you have to be related to each other; it’s whether or not you have the gene(s) for the particular skillset or attribute that enables you to get out of your current situation. While intelligence is no guarantee of success, lack of intelligence is highly predictive for failure. If I surveyed only whites, for example, the intelligence scores, standardized test scores and financial success would all roughly correlate. And where highly intelligent white children were born into poor circumstance, their odds of moving up and out would be much higher than their white peers with lower intelligence. ---
**Author:** ![Vox\_Imperatoris](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Vox\_Imperatoris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vox_Imperatoris)\ **Post date:** [February 22, 2009, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/64 "2009-02-22T19:23:11Z")
> [@The\_Tao\_s\_Revenge](#): > > Getting involved with drugs is a choice so is dropping out. That had nothing to do with her genetics and all to do with her character and choices. Smart people get involved with drugs and drop out too. > > The assertion is the ghetto is the ghetto because people are reprogrammed by their genetics to be there. > > Another thing that assertion fails at is account for street smarts. Street smarts are more EQ based where as academic success is more IQ based. > > A person can develop either skill set but will usually focus on or the other in my opinion. > > The ghetto is a very social setting and people there will develop street smarts that make you look like a complete retard. > In short the world you personally know isn’t all there is to know about the world. Perhaps people in the ghetto do have more “street smarts”. Great for them, but that’s is also not a trait that achieves one success in the modern American business world, as is being predisposed to acting out and taking drugs. Those things bring failure (or at least do not usually bring success), and one contemporary measure of failure is whether one lives in the ghetto. _You_ may not choose to use this measure, but other people do, so many that we can generally agree that living in the ghetto is a negative condition. Valete, Vox Imperatoris ETA: The thing is, **The Tao’s Revenge** , nobody cares much about EQ. While having it might, in rare cases, assist one in becoming an artist, a movie star, or a musician (at least I think this kind of thing is what you’re talking about), it does not provide all that much benefit in the modern environment, as least when we’re talking strictly about economic benefits, as would make sense in a thread about solving the \*\*problem \*\*of getting people out of the ghetto. ---
**Author:** ![EasyPhil](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e47c2d/32.png) [@EasyPhil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EasyPhil)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 1:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/65 "2009-02-23T01:25:36Z")
I think the term we should be using here is **Slum** not **Ghetto**. ---
**Author:** ![EasyPhil](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e47c2d/32.png) [@EasyPhil](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EasyPhil)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/66 "2009-02-23T01:44:33Z")
> [@Vox\_Imperatoris](#): > > Perhaps people in the ghetto do have more “street smarts”. Great for them, but that’s is also not a trait that achieves one success in the modern American business world, as is being predisposed to acting out and taking drugs. Those things bring failure (or at least do not usually bring success), and one contemporary measure of failure is whether one lives in the ghetto. _You_ may not choose to use this measure, but other people do, so many that we can generally agree that living in the ghetto is a negative condition. > > Valete, > Vox Imperatoris I disagree with you here, I think that with “street smarts” all other things being equal, one would have the edge over someone without them. In many situations have “street smarts” could be the difference between life or death. > [@](#): > > ETA: The thing is, **The Tao’s Revenge** , nobody cares much about EQ. While having it might, in rare cases, assist one in becoming an artist, a movie star, or a musician (at least I think this kind of thing is what you’re talking about), it does not provide all that much benefit in the modern environment, as least when we’re talking strictly about economic benefits, as would make sense in a thread about solving the \*\*problem \*\*of getting people out of the ghetto. The majority of people do not exist on the high side of the IQ scale the vast majority of people work in civil service or simply service and manufacturing jobs. They also don’t live in slums unless of course there’s no other recourse with respect to economics. EQ is the thing that enables others to follow and work for you, which means you wind up being the effective boss, manager, employee of the month and the team player. ---
**Author:** ![Joe\_Hermon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/4da419/32.png) [@Joe\_Hermon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Joe_Hermon)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 2:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/67 "2009-02-23T02:20:42Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > As time went by, we started implementing government policies that favor the suburbs. We tore up trolley tracks and started building highways (later, when we built light rail systems, we conveniently didn’t put any stops in “bad” neighborhoods.) We created massive subsidies for home ownership. **We created a systems- like CA Prop 13- where public schools in new suburbs get top notch funding and schools in the inner city get minimal funding.** We zoned for malls and strip malls in a way that caused the downtown shopping districts to whither and die. This may be so in Ca, but in NJ is pure nonsense. There’s 616 school districts in NJ, 31 (mostly in the inner city) receive about 50% of the TOTAL available state funding. ---
**Author:** ![What\_the\_deuce](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/71e660/32.png) [@What\_the\_deuce](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_the_deuce)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/68 "2009-02-23T02:40:29Z")
**EasyPhil** , pardon my ignorance, but what’s the difference between slum and ghetto? ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/69 "2009-02-23T04:24:54Z")
A slum is a bad place to live. A ghetto is a restricted area where one ethnicity is confined. ---
**Author:** ![What\_the\_deuce](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/71e660/32.png) [@What\_the\_deuce](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_the_deuce)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/70 "2009-02-23T04:53:51Z")
> [@E-Sabbath](#): > > A slum is a bad place to live. A ghetto is a restricted area where one ethnicity is confined. You’re using an older definition of “ghetto”. Could it be that the words mean the same thing in modern English? ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/71 "2009-02-23T06:53:31Z")
> [@What\_the\_deuce](#): > > You’re using an older definition of “ghetto”. Could it be that the words mean the same thing in modern English? Although “ghetto” no longer carries the meaning that the group in question is confined there by force, it does suggest an area with a predominant group living there due to social pressures. Saint-Henri was once a slum, but because it was mainly French-Canadians who lived there – a group which, of course, also lived in most other neighbourhoods in Montreal – it wasn’t a ghetto. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/72 "2009-02-23T19:31:33Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > As time went by, we started implementing government policies that favor the suburbs. We tore up trolley tracks and started building highways (later, when we built light rail systems, we conveniently didn’t put any stops in “bad” neighborhoods.) We created massive subsidies for home ownership. We created a systems- like CA Prop 13- where public schools in new suburbs get top notch funding and schools in the inner city get minimal funding. We zoned for malls and strip malls in a way that caused the downtown shopping districts to whither and die. I think most of **even sven** ’s post is spot on, thought it certainly isn’t true that modern-day transit lines always bypass poor districts. L.A.'s Blue Line runs right through Compton and Watts on its way from Long Beach to downtown L.A. Removal of existing trolley lines never made sense to me; if you have a system in place why would you remove it? Even in city streets, a trolley gives passengers a ride that is much smoother and slightly faster, thanks to easier acceleration and braking. And flexibility of routing, a much vaunted advantage of buses over trolleys, is nearly meaningless when you consider that the arterial street bus routes in most cities have been running the same routes, day in and day out, for generations. Nobody had any particular reason to want the tracks gone–except motorists concerned about tire damage and disliking the rough ride you sometimes got when driving along tracks. In a political climate in which only the middle and upper classes was catered to, it’s not hard to see who won. It was the beginning of the Age of Zoning, because as cities and suburbs were intentionally zoned into strictly residential and commercial districts, they were less overtly zoned into good and bad districts. In L.A.'s old mixed-use Bunker Hill neighborhood, in which incomes were mostly low, there was nevertheless sufficient surplus income to support a variety of local merchants in a way that made the area highly conducive to pedestrians and transit riders. But that all had to go; in a type of blight peculiar to L.A., much of the area was then occupied by office towers and a few high-rent apartment towers, interspersed among barren, sterile plazas where once there had been streets thronging with life. The inner district of any car-dependent city was especially vulnerable to the pattern by which suburbanites drove in to work, or an event, and drove right back out. Merchants who might have hoped to attract some business from these people were left out in the cold. It also explains why most of the old hotels in downtown L.A. have tended to become fleabags. There still may be one downtown in which Benjamin Harrison, the first President to visit Los Angeles, stayed, but it’s certainly no place you’d want to be now. The same is true of the Alexandria, where Theodore Roosevelt once stopped, and Charles Chaplin was a frequent visitor. My reasoning is thus: suppose you run a hotel in a more pedestrian friendly city, like New York. Even if the neighborhood is on the slide, you have at least some motivation to keep some kind of restaurant, and maybe a bar going, to attract passersby. You thereby are also motivated to keep the place marginally presentable. In a place like L.A., not so much, because there aren’t enough pedestrians. This was not good in an era when the downtown hotels had historically been important centers of urban life. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/73 "2009-02-23T19:37:23Z")
> [@E-Sabbath](#): > > A slum is a bad place to live. A ghetto is a restricted area where one ethnicity is confined. Or more recently, where one ethnicity has tended to concentrate for economic or cultural reasons, but today usually used only of an such a district that is also “bad”. The original “ghettoes” were in European cities and the ethnicity confined there were Jews, who were generally not allowed to live anywhere else. ---
**Author:** ![E-Sabbath](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e19adc/32.png) [@E-Sabbath](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/E-Sabbath)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2009, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813/74 "2009-02-23T21:06:26Z")
I didn’t say confined by outside force. I was leaving it more open than that. Eg, social pressure. Chinatown, f’r example, is a ghetto. The difference is that Chinatown may be quite nice. Tends not to be, but it _can_ be. Slums can be mixed in any way, the common factor being their low quality. Hm. Would a rich ‘gated community’ in the middle of a bad area be a ghetto? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-cities-often-have-hellhole-ghetto-inner-cores-any-solution/486813.md?page=3)