“When all the fancy rhetoric about ‘blight’ is stripped away, American urban renewal was a response to the question, ‘The poor are always with us, but do we have to see them everyday?’  The problem the planners tackled was not how to undo poverty. but how to hide the poor” (197).  I never really thought about New York City hides its poor before.  Yes, Time Square is famous for its skyscrapers.  Tourists admire the tall buildings and bright lights.  New York is the city that never sleeps.  But I never thought about poverty in New York as an “ugly secret.”  When you go anywhere in the city, you often find homeless people on the streets or in the subway.  There is poverty everywhere.  Still, most people tend to ignore them if they can.  I never thought that the city actively tries to hide the poor because I always thought that most people just ignore them in the first place.  This made me wonder: people constantly talk about helping the poor, but few people ever really do that.  Why?