Race, Urban Poverty, and Public Policy

Despite increased diversity across the country, America’s neighborhoods remain highly segregated along racial and ethnic lines. Residential segregation, particularly between African-Americans and whites, persists in metropolitan areas where minorities make up a large share of the population. This paper will examine residential segregation imposed upon African-Americans and the enormous costs it bears. Furthermore, the role of government will be discussed as having an important role in carrying out efforts towards residential desegregation. By developing an understanding of residential segregation and its destructive effects, parallels may be drawn between efforts aimed at combating

Recent events that have highlighted racial tension in the United States have had even a larger number of opinions that vary regarding why the nation continues to struggle with such a challenging issue. In our text Chapter 6 titled “The City/Suburban Divide” (Judd & Swanstrom, 2015, p. 136) identifies a subject that very well may contribute to the tension. A reference to the “urban crisis” describes a landscape that is littered with “high levels of segregation, inequality and poverty, along with racial and ethnic tensions.” (Judd, et al., p. 165) Many scholars argue that the crisis was a result of the demographic changes the nation experienced following World War II as advancements in technology and infrastructure aided White Mobility. The term “White Flight” has been used to describe a massive relocation early in the twentieth century when the White Middle-Class population left the cities for suburban areas following the great migration.

The loss of public housing and the expanse of the wealth gap throughout the state of Rhode Island has been a rising issue between the critics and supporters of gentrification, in both urban areas such as Providence and wealthy areas such as the island of Newport, among other examples. With the cities under a monopoly headed by the wealth of each neighborhood, one is left to wonder how such a system is fair to all groups. Relatively speaking, it isn’t, and the only ones who benefit from such a system are white-skinned. With the deterioration of the economic status of Rhode Island, and especially in the city of Providence, more and more educated Caucasians are leaving to seek a more fertile economic environment.

When someone thinks of the poor they instantly imagine a homeless man sleeping in a cardboard box or the nearest garbage can, but the working poor especially in the inner-city is commonly overlooked by society. However the working poor, in this case the working poor in the inner-city, are people advancing to try and make their lives better. They are taking minimum wage jobs so that they can barely afford a roof over their heads. Within Katherine Newman?s novel No Shame In My Game, she studies the working poor in the inner-city to draw conclusions about how to help them and dispute common stereotypes and the images people commonly view. Newman?s conclusions along with the

Many of the poor work; indeed, there are more working poor than unemployed poor people in the United States and most other affluent democracies (Brady, et al. 2010). Thus work has been integrated with poverty rather than noted as a guaranteed source of escape from poverty. Nevertheless, the links between work and poverty have often been studied in relation to how work allows one to escape poverty and how a loss of work leads to poverty. Authors, Bane and Ellwood “Slipping into and out of poverty: The dynamics of spells” 1986, shows how the dynamics of poverty are linked to the dynamics of employment. In the book, “No Shame in My Game: The working poor in the inner city” Newman (1999), examines the low-wage careers of the working poor and the

Employment challenges and economic disparities amongst Hispanics in the United States has been an ongoing battle, social policies along with institutions continue to perpetuate poverty among Latinos’ and African Americans. According to Liu (2011), Labor market segmentation by race/ethnicity, gender, and national origin has been recognized as a prominent feature of urban labor markets in immigrant gateway cities across the United States. A direct example of this would be when Cubans’ immigrated to Miami in the 1960’s, at first, they were welcomed by the Americans with open arms until they realized they could be in competition for employment as the Cubans were not leaving to go back home. This created many issues especially when it came to welfare,

This time in the post World War II era, many African Americans had began to become a more urbanized center of population, around 1970. (Inmotionaame, pg. 1) The regular population included about 70 percent of just the natural population to live in more urbanized cities. (Inmotionaame, pg. 1) Soon African Americans dominated, having 80 percent of their community to live and take the same benefits in more urbanized centers of the Unites States. (Inmotionaame, pg. 2) Only about 53 percent of African Americans and others who seemed to migrate stayed in the same area around the South. (Inmotionaame, pg. 2)

New York City's fastest growing immigrant group are Dominicans, a Spanish speaking people, flocking from the Dominican Republic to the United States, New York City in specific. In 1980 the Dominican population in NYC was 125,380, in 1990 it was 332,713, and today in 1999 it is an estimated 500,000 people. The only problem with this is through the years of their migration to America, their per capita income has declined precipitously. It seems as though when the Dominican population in America increases, their income as a whole decreases. Nearly half of the Dominicans in NYC live below the poverty level. In 1990 29% of Dominicans where on welfare. Of foreign people immigrating to the U.S., only people from the former Soviet Union had a higher percentage of people living on public assistance. From 1989 to 1996 their per capita income declined 23% to $6,094 a year, in inflation adjusted dollars, while their poverty rate rose from 37% to 46%, that is almost double for the city as a whole. Unemployment also rose from 17.2% in 1990 to 18.8% in 1996 (Lopez, p. 3). The source of these severe economic problems

On August 20th, 2016, The New York Times published an article titled “Affluent and Black, and Still Trapped by Segregation” written by John Eligon and Robert Gebeloff. The article discusses why wealthy African Americans choose to live in poverty-stricken areas as opposed to wealthier areas (Eligon and Gebeloff). The writers John Eligon and Robert Gebeloff clarify issues that most Americans would not see, such as children losing their sense of culture in more upscale communities (Eligon and Gebeloff). Culture is what separates different backgrounds of people around the world, and it is vital for everyone to have their own culture that we can learn from. When African Americans culture becomes infringed upon, they take the necessary precautions

Racism is a constitutive feature of capitalism. Along with other modes of domination, racism constructs and enshrines those social hierarchies that legitimize expropriation, naturalize exploitation, and produce the differential value capital instrumentalizes in the interest of profit (Rodney 1981; Robinson 2000; Melamed 2015; Pulido 2016). Historically in the U.S., race has been produced in and through space. Housing, lending, zoning and environmental policies, as well as foundational and ongoing confiscatory processes at the heart of racial capitalism have linked race, place, and power in pernicious, “death-dealing” ways (Gilmore 2002:16; Lipsitz 2007; Fraser 2016). From the frontier to the plantation, the border to the reservation, the constitutive geographies of U.S. nationhood have inextricably bound race and space. Scholars of racial capitalism embed uneven development within this active and ongoing co-production of race and space. They emphasize that social difference is foundational, not incidental, to the production of the uneven spatial forms that underwrite racial capitalism. Race has been produced with and through space via urban renewal, restrictive covenants, systemic abandonment and the ‘racialization of state policy’ (Gotham 2000:14) by which the benefits of housing, lending and other urban policies have been afforded to some and denied to others (see Coates 2014; Shabazz 2015 for Chicago). Thus, vacant land and buildings on Chicago’ s South Side are not

In order to support his opinion, the author uses historical references to the enormous impact of racial inequality on African American lives. Additionally, Desmond names a set of historical data and rates of the poor African Americans in cities to enhance the reader’s understanding of this complex situation. African Americans were also more likely to get the apartment with broken furniture, windows, and other facilities that confirmed the existence of racial inequality (Desmond, 2016, p.249). To reassert his position, Desmond provides offensive statistics that millions of people are evicted from American homes, and most of them are African American (Desmond, 2016, p.293). As a matter of fact, the author proves that housing discrimination based on race is the primary cause of

Understanding that the poverty of black Americans did not just stay within the home is a big step in understanding urban poverty. Urban poverty reached outside the home, into the parks, schools and playgrounds. With poverties reach being that extensive, there was something other than adversity causing this. Louis Gates wrote an article about this called “Black America and The Class Divide.” (Jr.)

Income inequality has a direct relationship with middle class Americans’ destructive and poor lifestyle. In the poor areas of South Chicago, the black communities suffer “higher crime rates, poor performance in school, and family management,” said Robert Sampson, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago. Similarly, Harvard University sociologist William Julius Wilson found “patterns of racial exclusion” and “concentrated poverty” among the middle-class Americans in South Chicago “are much more likely to be exposed to crime and other manifestations of social dislocation and social problems…” Poor minority groups are not only affected by destructive and poor lifestyle due to income inequality but also, poor whites are affected. Poor

A quarter mile from my house there was an entire plaza of Southeast Asian stores and restaurants and a half mile away was another, larger plaza with mostly Mexican and other Central American businesses and spaces. In spite of this economic activity, the predominance of apartments, with 66.7% of occupied housing units being renter occupied and nearly 80% of the total population living in these units, in addition to 82.1% of the Spanish speaking population over the age of 25 having earned less than a highschool diploma are emblematic of the relationship between being a person of color in this country and the barriers to accumulating wealth. This is supported as well by the fact that 11.4% of those who speak only English at home are below the poverty level whereas this number is 32.8% for those who speak Spanish or Spanish Creole.

Gentrification in Detroit, with whites beginning to move in and occupy areas that have been previously inhabited by blacks is gaining momentum, with a cheerleading media and political elites leading the way with tax breaks for corporations, new residents who are predominately white and economically middle to upper class, and a heavy police presence. All of the above factor are manifestations of a political climate in the United States of Republican led initiatives of austerity programs. Spurred on by the idea of privatization, and the Free Market economic policy of corporations having the freedom to influence and control the resources of Public institutions and politics, further eroding the opportunities for the average person, which is magnified in the Black community with disastrous results. Juxtaposed with the majority of the city, where, blight, unemployment, closing of schools, crime are all remnants of a once great city are evident to anyone that courageously visits these