It depends upon the city and the industry that grew up there.
It depends upon transport links, if there was a substantial rail/train system you will have a very differant outcome to a newer city which has no such infrastructure.
Newer cities are geared toward car use, older ones are often limited by that previous infrastructure.
Extremely large cities are differant again, attracting an inner city living elite where housing is extremely expensive.
So really you are going to have to pick your city and its own particular history, you can perhaps select a city of a type and compare with others of the same typs, but in the US, the growth and types of industry are so diverse this is probably not a useful excercise. You have certain one-industry towns and cities in the US, in the UK not quite so much - the one industry places tend to be towns rather than cities.
You are going to have to look into local history to discover what you want to know which will in all liklehood mean a visit to your local library and museum.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the creation of government housing projects. Originally intended as low income appartment housing, they have essentially became crime and drug infested eyesores where we warehouse the poor.
As already pointed out, those who could started fleeing to the newly created suburbs in the 50s after WWII. This started a vicious circle of “white flight” as urban centers lost their tax base resulting in worse schools and decreased services. The loss of manufacturing jobs in places like Bethlehem, PA; Bridgeport, CT; Detroit, MI; Pittsburg, PA; and Newark, NJ also contributed to the problem as those with the means moved to suburbs where crime was lower.
In the past few decades, there has been a trend towards gentrification of formarly blighted urban centers. The old joke is first the starving artists move in, then the gays, then the Yuppies. A prime example of this is NYC under Guilianni. One way he did this was to Disney-fy Times Square. A slew of movies and tv shows glamorizing Manhattan life in the 80s and 90s certainly helped too.
The downside to this is as the desirability of the inner cities increases, rising costs push low and middle income families furthur out or into pockets of undesirable locales. An example of this is Boston (as I remember it about 10 years ago). Downtown is relatively expensive. Even “Southie” was becoming gentrified. Just to the north and south are communities like Charleston and Roxbury that are poorer and more blue collar. And then you get into the North and South Shores which are pretty nice.
A lot of these poor neighborhoods are that way because they are in undesirable locations near indistrial parks or airports or other NIMBY detractors. So the only people who live there are the ones who have no choice.
The problems I see are that historical evidence suggests that her explanations are incorrect.
Not exactly.
Or perhaps the situation improved vis-a-vis education, nutrition, and discrimination? You seem to be assuming that I am claiming genetics is the sole cause of the underclass, which I am clearly not claiming.
I’m a little confused – are you talking about identical twins? Can you give me some examples?
I’m not sure I see your point, but I think it’s an interesting question. For example, suppose one looks at children’s SAT scores and divides them into 4 groups: (1) white children from wealthy families; (2) white children from poor families; (3) black children from wealthy families; and (4) black children from poor families. I predict that average scores from group (1) would be higher than those from group (3) and average scores from group (2) would be higher than those from group (4).
Can I take it you predict that (1) and (3) would be roughly the same (and ditto for (2) and (4))?
It’s based on my general knowledge and experience, which no doubt includes stuff I have read.
You’re the first person to mention the word “black” in this thread. At the point of your thread, no one had even said “African” so you can’t fall back on that either.
Same goes for “dumb” “greed” or…hell, I’m going to at least assume you’ve read this thread so I don’t need to point all this crap out to you. But no one’s said any such thing.
A current big problem in Montreal is that the traditionally lower-class areas near downtown – the one I know best is the Sud-Ouest, where I lived for a number of years – have over the last decade seeing the advent of the condos that were described above. (The situation in Montreal is a little different because we’ve always had an extremely high downtown residential density, and even at the worst of the economic times in the 80s never really abandoned the central business district, which has lots of retail as well as three universities and so forth.) This was preceded by areas such as the Plateau (a case study for the urban bohemian thing – poor people → poor artists and students → people who want to live in a cool neighbourhood → people who are willing to buy expensive condos) and the Village, and areas such as Hochelaga-Maisonneuve are now following.
I’m not going to deny that it has its benefits, but it has a lot of concomitant problems that are not being dealt with. The gentrification causes property values, and consequently property taxes and rents even in non-gentrified buildings, to increase. Also, prices for groceries and such go up. Finally, property owners who want to get in on the development use various legal and not-so-legal methods to force their tenants out so they can sell and/or redevelop their properties.
As poor people leave the neighbourhood, the social ties and community organizations they crafted together are disrupted, making things difficult both for them and for those who remain.
We’re now seeing people move really far from downtown to find decent rents – Laval, Pointe-aux-Trembles, etc. I’ve heard of people having to move as far away as Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, more than 30 km away. Further compounding the problem is the fact that they depend on big-city services such as public transit, social services, and so forth, making life all the more difficult once they move farther away from those services and/or to places where it’s more difficult to get around if you don’t own a car.
We did, of course, have had one-industry cities, which have suffered hardship as these have collapsed - the way Liverpool was wedded to the sea and Bradford to manufacturing, for example, can be compared to Detroit’s reliance on the motor industry.
Our towns are generally so close that commuting to find work in another city is often, and usually possible.
Some UK towns have become dormitory towns for larger cities, especially in the South East, but also around Manchester and Birmingham.
We do have some, such as Corby which was a relatively new town, historically speaking and it hadn’t developed any other industry except steel.
In the US, if the main employer in a one industry town shuts, thats it, distances are too great.
The UK cities tended to be overshadowed by Victorian development and along with that, lots of railways but US cities are often geared only for the motor car.
We do have the freeport/out of town shopping that has led to the decline of central business districts, but the UK city dynamic is differant to the US.
The coded language and enuendo used by brazil84(who to me has a racist POV), I believe is what prompted even sven to just lay it out right on the table because face it, we all know what population is being talked about here.
I think even sven’s analysis is pretty much on point with respect to WWII, housing and subsequent transfer of wealth, real estate being the main vehicle for wealth transfer from one generation to the other. It is true that this is multi-factoral but it revolves primarily around institutionalized racism(which includes white flight, redlining, benign neglect, etc), the erosion of the US industrial base i.e. we make less things here now than we did 40 years ago.
Folks trapped in “such places” usually have the least resources to enable their own success–obviously no personal capital, poor family structure, and most importantly, limited average intelligence. The brighter subgroup which manages to get out leaves behind a population with even lower average intelligence, and the cycle persists.
Extending services concentrates this population even more; if I have no money, can’t succeed in school and need external resources, I’m not going to decide to strike out on my own and go live in rural Wyoming.
You’ll find a lot of explanations around external things–racism; transportation; crime–on and on. Ultimately, however, the potential for average success is tied most closely to average intelligence, and in the populations left behind in our inner cities (and, for that matter, ghettos the world over), a lower average IQ is the largest single factor for persistence of limited success. Over the years many ghetto populations have risen to more equitable positions in society’s ranks with similar external pressures.
For a while most whites even if they were in the same “class” didn’t want to live near black people. That had nothing to do with class differences but more to do with racism.
So you’re talking eugenics here? It’s the genes huh? Wasn’t this debunked along with the whole “Master Race” theory?
When and how was this tried? Manufacturing/low skilled jobs have been flowing out of the country for a while now.
More eugenics bullshit here.
I think you should be first in line for the cognitive drug.
Yeah, I know. brazil84 has a long history of talking about “certain populations”, “genetic cohorts”, etc. But I’m a fan of us all just saying what we are saying. If you are going to start talking about race, might as well be honest about it.
Lol. Please show me where I used the phrase “genetic cohort.” Anyway, the OP could have easily mentioned that “hellhole ghetto inner cores” typically have a racial component to them. But he or she chose not to do so.
I agree, but again note that the OP made no mention of race. And none of this changes the fact that you set up a big juicy strawman to attack.
This attitude annoys me. Just because certain racist eugenic theories of the early twentieth century were debunked doesn’t mean that any explanation involving genetics is necessarily false and racist. Do you deny that genes influence human behavior? Assuming you don’t, why do you think that intelligence is not at least partially influenced by genes? Note that I’m not saying it wholly influences behavior, and things like ignorance (as opposed to stupidity) and a natural desire to live in one’s home environment play a large part as well.
I didn’t say that, and brazil84 didn’t either (although I don’t know what the man actually thinks). I said that genes for low intelligence (or behaviors that are not likely to achieve success in today’s world) are probably more likely to be prevalent in poor, inner city communities, regardless of skin color. I don’t have any studies (and I’m not sure that there could be any, given that practical intelligence is so multifaceted and hard to measure), but I’m just saying that the idea can’t be dismissed out of hand as racist, when it has nothing to do with race besides words that you are putting into his mouth.