The poor and disadvantaged in America are blamed for their own misfortune, often advised to “get a job” or simply to “stop being poor” (no really, someone actually said that), while in reality, they have little control over their own environments and are given much fewer options than middle-class whites when it comes to jobs, housing, and education. If a community is viewed by the public eye as “blighted”—whether that be due to racism, classism, or a mix of both and other elements—then they receive less services. Les services leads to more decay, leading to even more social disapproval, leading to more decay, etc. In this way a complex systems of government forces, public opinion and social bias, and private interest groups can create vicious cycles of poverty and neglect in urban communities, using minority groups as scapegoats for the problems that arise from systematized urban decay. In America, minority groups are discriminated against and deal with intense social bias, leading to higher rates of poverty, and so “planned shrinkage” (aka urban decay) is encouraged through public policy (such as the racist redlining and denial of municipal services to South Bronx residents as discussed in this weeks reading) and is favorable to politicians who want the wealthiest tax base possible. Urban decay also benefits private interest groups and companies, such as lending companies that charged higher loan rates in “declining” areas in order to control who could afford to move into that area, or retail and restaurants that are often put in place of the old, deserted urban communities. Most of all, urban decay benefits institutionalized racism. After all, it’s not really about poverty, because even if you are wealthy and a minority, chances are you will still be discriminated against and forced to make decisions with both hands tied. Just as we have been finding more and more factors that are involved in the contemporary, subtle, and systematic racism that exists in U.S. housing practices and government policies, this weeks reading by Wallace highlights several more factors that contribute to another facet of this racism: “planned shrinkage”. These factors include rates of HIV/AIDS, lack of provision of basic services leading to increases in crowding and fires, rates of drug use, and erosion of community. The key to these policies and to Wallace’s report is that none of these factors and events are simple cause-and-effect relationships, but that each factor is an essential piece to a complicated puzzle, where each factor aggravates and is aggravated by another factor, leading to a destructive “positive feedback” loop that destroys urban areas so that they can be cleared out, bleached, and replaced with high end stores and high tax paying citizens. It looks like although the days of the “Corbu combine” might be fading, even more dangerous racist, classist policies threaten to take its place. Which do you think is worse, and why?
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