In “From Underclass to Entrepreneur,” Katz brings up the term “underclass” and goes into length defining the term and describing the connotations. It surprised me that this term was used recently in the 70s and 80s though I had never heard the term used in such a way before. What is more surprising is how much New York City has changed since then. Underclass, used to describe New York’s urban inner city areas, “conjured up a mysterious wilderness in the heart of America’s cities; a terrain of violence and despair.” The New York now, with it’s much lower crime rates, doesn’t seem to resemble the dangerous urban area filled with the “underclass” as it used to be.
It was interesting to read about Brace’s 1854 report about how “the growing density of America’s cities had eroded the character of their inhabitants.” Unlike Jane Jacobs’ ideas of how a bustling city would be a safer one, Brace argued that the density and over crowding was “corrupting” others around those areas. Housing reformers from the 1900s had similar reactions to slums, labeling them as “viruses infecting the moral and physical health of the city districts that surrounded them.” Poorer districts were considered to be an infection of the city and were avoided in order to prevent contamination.
From such an attitude towards the slums grew the distinction between the “deserving and undeserving poor.” Those whose misfortunes came about accidentally, such as in the case of a widowed women, were labeled the deserving poor. Unskilled, minority, or unwilling to work men, especially alcoholics, were considered undeserving and “sentiment … did not shift in [their] favor.” Thus campaigns were run to deplete such people from relief programs.
Michael Porter brought up several very interesting points regarding these inner-city neighborhoods. He spoke about the potential of these areas to “create wealth.” I agree with his point that policies should get out of the “trap of redistributing wealth,” which doesn’t create any real value, and instead work with an economic model to develop profitable businesses that would benefit the people and the communities. Porter claimed such areas had four concrete competitive advantages such as a “strategic location” in the middle of the city, high “local market demand” in an unsaturated market, “potential for integration,” and vast “human resources” of people who are eager to work. The policies of the government and other sectors mainly needed to provide a “hospitable environment” to allow for such businesses to grow. Porter was successful with some of his theories after developing the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City and opened up thousands of jobs in small businesses for people in inner-city areas.
A more recent program to help out such neighborhoods included Bloomberg’s Opportunity NYC. Not particularly effective, the program was said to award the “undeserving poor” by providing incentives for “parents who had not been sending their children to school regularly.” I don’t think any similar programs can be effective since there may always be a population to take advantage and be incentivized to do less in order to receive benefits. Something that encourages people to invest in themselves and the surrounding community may be more effective but the question remains of how to implement such a program without too much policy involvement.
