As many of my class mates have stated, this week’s reading is disturbing. Not just because it discussed way in which those most susceptible to urban decay and diseases like HIV are taken advantage of and treated like lesser human beings, but because the way in which those things were propagated was so deliberate. It hurts to hear that basic services like fire departments were pulled from poor neighborhoods, leading to displacement as urban decay in those neighborhoods grew. I wonder how such policies were able to be passed, and how we can change what happens in these areas, now that we are aware of this.
The connections between urban decay and the spread of HIV is something I wouldn’t have thought much about, but now that I’ve read about it, it seems that we need to make services for people with hiV more accessible, so that people don’t have to be in one specific location to get the health services they ned. As for how to stop the displacement, as we discussed last week, that is a more complicated matter which obviously required further discussion.
