A Look Into Inner City Poverty

When a neighborhood is gentrified it will not only change the image of it, but also the services available there (Al-Kodmany 2011, 62-63). In other words, gentrification does not only have an impact on the physical aspect of the land, but also the resources that lie there. During the 90s, the Near West Side neighborhood located near Loop, an up-scale neighborhood, sought drastic changes within the area. The changes in racial demographics in the Near West Side indicated that the health risks that affected minorities dropped in the past decade (1992-2002) (Al-Kodmany 2011,

With Youngstown leading the nation with a poverty rate of 49.7%, it is clear that this isn’t a good place to live. It is one of six cities with greater than 40% poverty in the U.S, and has over 63.3% of children living below the poverty line. The metropolitan statistical area of which Youngstown is a part of is ranked just 16 from the bottom of the poverty barrel. While it’s apparent Youngstown is struggling, there is one

For many years cities like Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland to name a few, have been slowly losing population and the end of the decrease still hasn’t been determined yet. The city of Cleveland has been hit with multiple downturns; declining steel mill, massive ford plant shutdowns, increased crime rate, and the inner city school district quality. Coming into this world, we are always striving towards the “American Dream” and for the people in the city; this idea is starting to fade away because of the lack of opportunity for them to succeed. The city council of Cleveland needs to rebuild the industry and fund better schooling in order to prevent thousands of people from leaving.

In the novel “Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City” written by Elijah Anderson, Elijah discusses how the environment and the economy affects the choices that youths in the inner-city make. Elijah argues that the inner-city black America is extremely violent, but he also asserts that there is this “code” individuals in these areas need to understand in order not to be harmed. Elijah supports this code using interviews and personal stories from individuals living in the inner-cities. An important key point to remember from this novel is that violence happens because of the socioeconomic issues that surround these cities. In order for Elijah to explain what life in the inner city is like, he engaged in participant observation, direct observation, and conducted interviews in the state of Philadelphia. He used these methods to support the

In the early 20th century, Camden, New Jersey was known as “a city invincible” with a booming economy fueled by manufacturing. At Camden’s manufacturing peak, there were nearly 43,000 factory jobs, but in the 1950s they began to face a period of economic stagnation and deindustrialization. Over the course of nearly thirty years, the industrial jobs had dropped to a mere 10,000 and alongside the manufacturing decline Camden became a city of economic, political, and social ruins. Today Camden is one of the poorest and most crime ridden cities in the nation, but by investing in future generations through mentorships, a revitalized public education system and the renovating and repurposing of infrastructure, Camden could see tremendous

So with spatial mismatch becoming a bigger issue as time went by, city gentrification became a routine for all cities creating even more disparity in ranges of wealth. People who have lived in their homes for a long time are now being forced out by plans to incorporate more businesses and malls. Property taxes began rising and as the city centers changed, people weren’t able to afford products in their own communities anymore. They dispersed to different sectors of the city, some moving completely out of the city. Gentrification not only affects where people live. It also affects local businesses. Small business owners can’t keep up with the rent because the community around the owners are now very high in value with new businesses, condos,

In light of my recent service learning project in another class, I decided to find an article that addresses poverty in Virginia. This article and graph is located on the Department of Social Services website beginning on page 5 through page 7. “Graphs and charts condense large amounts of information into easy to understand formats that clearly and effectively communicate important points” (CDC, 2008, para. 2). This graph displays the official poverty rate in Virginia in comparison to the United States. Each part of the graph is labeled clearly. The vertical scale represents the poverty rate in percentages, ranging from one percent to over fifteen present. The horizontal scale represents the time line of a thirty-year period, from 1978 through 2008.

Everyday poverty goes on around us and all over the world but thankfully there are organizations that work to help relieve poverty. People or families with low income or no income are affected by poverty. Poverty is the condition of having insufficient funds, goods, or support. While people are sound asleep at night without a care in the world, homeless and poor people are out searching for food or a place to sleep on the streets. Poverty is nothing new and it has always existed, “state poor laws, generally inherited from English tradition, required towns to take care of their poor” (Poverty). In present time when driving around Houston it is common to see homeless people and where they reside, “high poverty areas in Houston have quadrupled

Concentrated disadvantage is described as an indicator that is depicting the poverty in a specific area or region. I chose the city of Atlanta because I have lived near Atlanta all my life. I would occasionally travel to the city to watch the Atlanta Hawks play. On the way home from the games I would notice the numbers of people on the side of the streets that were sleeping or asking for money. I never understood the whole concept of why such things were happening in this part of town. I did not know why I never saw people like that when I was around my house, and I only saw them when I was in Atlanta. When I first enrolled in this class, I was excited that I was going to be able to learn how and why all of these patterns exist. Through the main source of my paper “Social Explorer,” I was able to attain the knowledge to understand the patterns of the inner city and why there was so much poverty.

Rauch (1993), Crihfield and Panggaben (1995), Glaser et al (1995), Simon (1998), Simon and Nardinelli (2002) and Glaser and Saiz( 2004) address human capital as impacting the economic performance of the area and is also identified as the main determinant of growth in metropolitan areas. Crihfield and Panggabean (1995) include four points of production function: labor, private physical capital, public infrastructure capital, and human capital. The researchers analyzed race, amenities, growth, geography as well as public capital investment to ascertain the large impact human capital has on the growth of the city, and in the case study of Atlanta, this growth impacts the revitalization of the

Over the decades, national and international organizations have focused on rural poverty without looking at urban poverty, which is the bigger challenge at the dawn of the century. It was not until the unrest caused by the misconduct of police in killing black men in Ferguson, Cleveland, Oakland, California, and Baltimore that the improvised lives of those living in urban cities came to light. Most of the minority groups in America’s big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Kansas experience low education standards, unemployment, crime, urban diseases, high detention rates, and ghettoized housing patterns driving them to poverty (Lemons, 2015). In other cities in states like Florida, up to a third of the city population live below the federal

One of the most successful efforts to reduce and more effectively measure poverty is Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO) in New York City. This paper will explain how the Center for Economic Opportunity was and still is so successful in combatting poverty and argue that its tactics should be implemented in cities across the nation. Poverty is one of the most important issues that the modern world has attempted to confront. For the most part it has been a huge success. Extreme global poverty has been cut in half in the past 20 years. This statistic is staggering, and not enough people realize how successful industrialization and the globalized world have been at eradicating extreme poverty. While this should be

Poverty has been a consistent problem throughout the history of the world. Despite the wealth of a country, there will always be people who are homeless and hungry. Poverty carries many different definitions, but one that truly encompasses all of its effects is, “the unfulfillment of basic human need required to adequately sustain life free from disease, misery, hunger, pain, suffering, hopelessness, and fear” (Julio, 76). Even though the United is one of the most prosperous countries in the world, it is not immune to poverty. In 2014, 46.7 million people (15%) were in poverty in the United States. This is no small issue, and one that we as Christians are called to combat. In the United States poverty is a national problem, however, it is most prevalent in the inner cities. The inner city is defined as, “A general term for impoverished areas of large cities. The inner city is characterized by minimal educational opportunities, high unemployment and crime rates, broken families, and inadequate housing” (Dictionary.com). Although, according to the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), absolute poverty is higher in the suburbs than in the inner cities, affecting 11 million people compared to 8 million people in the inner cities, poverty is still concentrated in the inner cities and is more prevalent there. The inner cities comprise less than 1% of land area versus the suburbs which comprise 17% of total land area – nearly 100x that of inner cities. Overall, 3 in 10

After reading Booth’s work on The Life and Labour of the People of London led me to construct my own investigation on poverty but in a provincial town so I can then find an applicable general conclusion for a smaller populated area.

A metropolitan refers to an area that comprises of a densely populated urban area and sparsely populated surrounding regions that share infrastructures, housing, and industries. The growth of metropolitan areas is essential for the nation and its citizens because they are the key political and economic regions. Metropolitan covers one or more urban areas, towns, satellite cities, and rural regions that are socially and economically joined to the urban areas. Various studies that had been conducted regarding the development of metropolitan areas, particularly in the United States, have found out that various factors have played a crucial role in fostering these developments. Some of these factors include; crime, race, immigration, and design assimilation. It is, therefore, significant to understand the benefits of metropolitan growth, who reaps them, the cost of metropolitan growth, and who is responsible for paying these costs.