What, according to Wilson, are the causes of poverty today, particularly among African-Americans in inner-city communities? What does he mean by racial vs. non-racial policies?
Wilson (2008-2009) states that the long term poverty among African American has been due to structural causes. In his article entitled The Political and Economic Forces Shaping Concentrated Poverty, the author argues that poverty among them is not due to their fault, but the societal fabric. In the current economic downturn, many of them have lost jobs due to recession and not due to lack of effort or unwillingness on their part. Some of the causes highlighted by him are, Federal housing policies that denied government sponsored mortgage to people in certain neighborhood thus reflecting the policies of New Deal years. People rendered jobless are isolated in their areas without being able to afford a car to travel to places where jobs are available. Wilson accuses Mayor Daley of Chicago among others responsible for constructing highways isolating the poor neighborhoods. Government programs that had been helping the poor were abandoned from the Reagan to G.W. Bush years. Poor people were kept out of certain communities preventing them from moving up in society due to deed restrictions and zoning laws. It is ironical that architects of the New Deal and Mayor Daley were Democrats who are supposed to be championing the causes of poor. Public policy prescriptions have never rallied to relieve the chronically poverty-stricken African Americans inhabiting the U.S. inner cities. It has been argued that the inner-city poverty has been due to structural economic shifts that rendered the central cities in the industrial sectors which provided substantial employment for the working poor uncompetitive as the demand for labor in those areas declined disastrously. The inner-city poverty is also a reflection of inadequacy in human capital that resulted in lower productivity and inhabitants’ inability to compete for jobs in emerging sectors that assure adequate wages. It has also been due to persistent racial and gender discrimination in employment preventing the African American population from realizing its full potential in the job market. The population of African Americans has remained isolated and detached from the main stream economy and labor market due to complex interaction and behavior. The long and historical segregation African Americans in the cities of the U.S. resulted in spatial mismatch between workers and jobs upon decentralization of employment. The migration processes that enable middle class and successful members of the community to move away from the neighborhoods thus reducing the social capital have also caused the inner-city poverty exacerbated by the entry of new and poorer populations which reduces wage rates and employment chances of the existing populations. The low-levels of entrepreneurship and access to capital for minority populations have resulted in endogenous growth deficit adding to the inner-city poverty. Inner-city poverty has also been due to failure of public policy which has worsened the problem rather than alleviating the social problems as an unintended consequence. Some economic forces that have rendered the once industrialized and urbanized cities into areas of no significant economic activities are rather nonracial, yet they have hastened the economic decline of the neighborhood in the inner city resulting in the yawning gaps in “race and income between cities and suburbs” The author states that some non-racial policies in respect of eliminating urban slums in reality turned to be racial as the implementation targeted only the African American living urban ghettos.
Summarize the urban renewal program discussed in Levy and Wilson. Finally, discuss several scenes of the video and relate those scenes to the readings.
Urban renewal is part of larger community development that has major goals and activities such as stimulation of economic growth, increased housing stock, and facilitation of retailing so that not only economic activity is stimulated but also people are assured of their day to day requirement of goods, and making available parks, recreational facilities, and parking facilities. Besides, it envisaged provisioning of social services such as day care, job training, and drug rehabilitation. Urban renewal planned with the enactment of the Housing Act 1949 terminated in 1973 but its effects continued through 1980 because of some funding programs started in 1973. Urban renewal mainly intended to eliminate substandard housing, and for revitalizing city economies, construction of good housing and avoiding de-facto segregation. An important land mark development of urban renewal was the concept of eminent domain power of the Government that sought to take over of the private property for public purpose and also to transform the blighted areas into economically viable units. However, this led to the abuse of power by letting private party take over blighted private property and improve it into economically viable units. This caused many States to ban private party to private party transfers. Although the urban renewal program initially aimed at creation of every new housing stock for elimination of at least one old housing unit in blighted condition. But, an inevitable development alongside was commercial development along with development of new housing units. While the intent of the Federal law was to develop housing, the States and local authorities undermined it by utilizing the federal funds for demolishing old dilapidated tenements and transforming the area for commercial development. People who lost their houses in the process had to move to neighboring communities rather than settling down in the same areas in the new houses built for them. It was mainly because people rendered homeless could not afford to pay more for the newly developed housing units. In retrospect, the urban renewal project cost the poor dearly. However, the positive aspect was that the urban renewal projects empowered many cities to compete with their suburbs. To summarize, the Housing Act gave the power of eminent domain to the States to acquire private property for redevelopment. However, the projects caused displacement of many as by the end of the program in 1973, some 600,000 housing units had been demolished displacing about 2 million people of low and moderate income. Many thousands of small businesses were destroyed without being able to revive. With the passage of Housing and Community Development Act 1974, there was a change of approach from “clear and re-build approach “to preservation and improvement. For example, the urban homesteading program of the city of Baltimore emphasized preservation of the prevailing urban fabric. The harshness of the old urban renewal program was sought to be mitigated by the requirement of citizens’ participation especially from low and middle income population in the new community development programs. The video What Poor Child Is This? Poverty and America's Children depicts in an even more poignant manner the state of affairs of African Americans portrayed by Levy. According to the video, twelve million American children are in poverty. The video highlights the plight of the poor children contradicting the American claims of upward mobility. The children are suffering from adverse economic outcomes such as financial hardship, broken families, reducing levels of literacy, exacerbated health and addiction risks, increasing mental illness, and criminal behavior. Absence of school readiness and substandard academic performing by these poor children have also been the outcomes of lopsided urban renewal programs since 1949 till 1980s. The film shows the images of the poorest Americans one third of whom are children. The diversity of the poor is highlighted by the homelessness and concentration of poverty in the neglected inner city neighborhoods. The film shows one in six children living in poverty as early as thirty years ago and it has only increased since then. The scenario depicted in the video are clearly relatable to the sufferings of hapless children of African Americans who stand even more isolated due to the lopsided urban renewal explained by Levy.
References
LathikaInternationalFilm&Entertainment (Director) (2011). What Poor Child Is This? Poverty and America's Children [Motion Picture].
Levy, J. M. (2011). Chapter 11 Urban Renewal and Community Development in Contemporary Urban Planning (10 ed.). Longman Publishing Group.
Wilson, W. J. (2008-2009). The Political and Economic Forces Shaping Concentrated Poverty. Political Science Quarterly , 123 (4), 555-571.
