As I was reading the Katz piece, the idea of how the poor became poor changed. When the Philadelphia Guardians said that those dependent on charity and public assistance were synonymous to the “undeserving poor,” I really thought these people had no minds. To me, it is so clear that some people simply couldn’t go up the social ladder because of their background. It is not necessarily their fault that they became dependent on it. Because of how they are dressed and the areas they live in, they were not given the opportunities to improve their lives as much as others. I don’t know who the Philadelphia Guardians are but I can’t help but think if they are educated people or not.

I was very surprised to read that racism was not the reason association with poverty was with black people. I did not know that it was actually the massive immigration of Africans after World War II were the cause. Since I live in the modern times, the ghettos are where most people associate poor black to be but at one point the country was still rural. Black people at that time still lived in rural areas and the ghettos in the cities were very small. While racism is a strong, driving force against black people, it is not always racism that makes us associate black people for certain qualities.

It sort of amazes how a term can transform so much over the course of time. Poverty was thought properly to be something caused by a poor person’s actions. People then were able to talk about the “deserving” and “underserving.” Then people started to divide the two categories into two, creating four total distinctions of certain levels of poverty. It is fascinating how much a word can change.

As I read the term “culture of poverty,” it seems very similar to “rape culture.” Both seem to blame the victims for what happened to them. Honestly, I never understood how some people could blame others for something like that. It isn’t like a poor person can suddenly become rich if he tries. There are certain obstacles in the way preventing him from doing so.

It is interesting how social programs at first were actually fueling the culture of poverty. The social programs themselves weren’t providing new opportunities for the underclass. It was simply helping them maintain the same way of life that generations of their families have lived. It kind of surprises me that writings about this did not draw to this conclusion faster. It isn’t straightforward but with more effort, I feel like the connection would have been seen sooner.

In Katz’s “From Underclass to Entrepreneur: New Technologies of Poverty Work in Urban America,” gave me another reason to think that harmony is the hardest substance to achieve in the midst of urbanization.

Gentrification, even though has been explained to me back in the days of IDC 3001, still seems relatively “alien” to me, mainly because I have lived in areas where gentrification went by unnoticed. Gentrification, the idea that new people coming into the neighborhood and changes the whole dynamic of the place, seems unrealistic to me. Idealistically, gentrification is used as a dominant force of revamping one neighborhood through the interaction between insiders and outsiders and somehow this interaction fuses the two groups together in “harmony” and brings in new culture and fresh perspective into the group. As a psychology major, I remain skeptical since “in-group, out-group” psychology generally prevents encroachment of outside perspectives into the existing environment, creating more discrimination and conflicts and promoting disruption of the community. Especially since little has been explored about the feeling of the existing neighborhood toward the wave of incoming gentrifiers, I expect, from a totally human point of view that at best, interaction will be little, since the existing residents themselves do not really interact with each other that much, let alone with the new people and even if they do, the quality of the interaction will be decreased since the same amount of interaction will happen with an increasing number of people in the neighborhood.

In short, gentrification, practically speaking, destroys the tightness of the community, if the tightness even exists to begin with. Yet the “theory” about the benefit of gentrification keeps extoling that having middle class people moving into a neighborhood will increase social ties. Maybe there has been something that I’ve been missing all along or that I am just that pessimistic. My view kept being echoed over again as I kept on reading the excerpt. The existing residents of the neighborhood are the driving force behind changes around the neighborhood rather than the new residents. Again, competition among in-group and out-group for the reign of the neighborhood will erupt and not cease to exist unless one group gains control and excludes the other faction from the throne. It’s just human nature.

The hostility, though mild in effect, becomes a driving force keeping the neighborhood from becoming gentrified. A classical example is given in the piece, about a black gentrifier named Jennifer, who, after moving into an existing resident of the neighborhood, was called “white” by another in-group resident. She is of course, not “white” in race, but “white” in the fact that she has the status of an outsider.

From a policy-maker point of view, gentrification may make the neighborhood more attractive in terms of real estate value and marketable for people who are looking to move in, but the neighborhood itself decreases in intrinsic, community value that really makes a neighborhood what it is. Depending on the outcome striven for, I really think policy makers should separate between “bettering a neighborhood” and “enriching a neighborhood.”

During a summer College Now class in high school, I was exposed to the idea of “poverty as pathology” – the idea that the poor are doomed to remain poor due to their own lack of motivation, focus on instant gratification and lack of initiative. In my opinion, this is a very simplistic and convenient explanation for a pervasive social problem. The strategy of “blaming the victim” is a recurrent theme in many debates about various social justice issues. Michael Katz’s discussion of 19th and 20th century attitudes towards poverty show that this attitude was the foundation of theories regarding urban poverty. It can be easily argued that this outlook on poverty is still highly prevalent in society. By determining poor people to be the cause of their own poverty, society can dissolve itself of any responsibility in trying to solve the problem.

This is the reason why the idea of the “underclass” became so easily accepted into mainstream theories about poverty, it was an idea that was legitimized by media – it appeared in Times magazine and other leading publications, as Mr. Katz mentions repeatedly – and it was palatable to the extent that policy makers didn’t have to see poverty as a consequence of failed social structures. The main problem with this, as Mr. Katz points out is the resulting image of the undeserving poor as being fundamentally different and therefore beyond the reach of solutions offered to those who were merely experiencing temporary financial difficulties. But, Mr. Katz makes several comparisons which show that the activities observed in poor neighborhoods and demonized by researchers and policy makers – such as drug dealing – were simply substitutes for mainstream market activities.

It was a really interesting connection to make that drug markets and markets for other illegal activities thrived in certain neighborhoods because mainstream markets such as the housing market did not exist in these neighborhoods. I wonder if Mr. Katz was suggesting that it was the natural entrepreneurial spirit at work here and with no legal means available, people turned to available markets as a way of getting ahead. In any case, the idea of creating markets in poor neighborhoods is a valid idea. But as exemplified by programs implemented during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, even programs that tried this approach have often failed.

The article identifies, with reference to the work of Michael Porter, the reason or the failure of these programs was that they treated inner city neighborhoods as being “different” and separate from their surrounding neighborhoods and economies. Instead of treating them as being lesser than other markets and desperately incentivizing businesses to invest, it would be a better idea to portray them as places with advantages such as their “strategic location,” yet-to-be saturated local demand, and vast wealth of untapped human resources.

The article goes on to discuss current programs in place, many of them involving public-private partnerships. This reflects, in my view, the general popularity of social entrepreneurship in recent times. Social entrepreneurship and public-private initiatives weren’t invented in this generation but such projects have certainly reached new and great heights in the past few years. I think there is great potential in the ideas discussed by Mr. Katz, particularly micro financing and the focus on education. With a growing understanding of the causes of poverty and destigmatization of the “underclass,” solutions to poverty can and should involve more than just food stamps and unemployment benefits.