Month: April 2017 (Page 1 of 4)

In Chapter 11 of Urban Issues, it is stated that regulations require lenders to closely examine factors such as a borrower’s income and debt levels which indicate an applicant’s ability to repay. Thus, according to Urban Issues, these factors are more often correlated by race and ethnicity. The fact that this is the case poses a really big problem with the system. It poses the issue of inequality once again and that not everyone has a fair opportunity of achieving their goals, whether it getting into a prestigious university or owning a home. Chapter 11 of Urban Issues highlights the point that non whites are often stagnant socioeconomically because they are not shown a way out of their income brackets and more so poverty. For instance, Urban Issues states that the HUD is guilty of consigning the poor to the inner city instead of having public housing throughout the city. In addition, one third of all African Americans living in the city were living in highly or hyper segregated neighborhoods. The only way people can really want a better life is if they have something to compare to. If non whites are constantly placed in neighborhoods that are impoverished then they would not know any better and even if they want to create a change, there are no resources accessible for them to do so. Some stated examples that showed this type of discrimination to be true was that the white testers who posed as customers were shown to a “safe” neighborhood while those who were black were shown to less desirable, high crime areas and African Americans, Hispanics and Asians seeking apartments to rent were shown fewer units than whites. One interesting point that was discussed in Urban Issues was that not much funding is granted to testers and part of the reason for this I believe, might be because the government does not want to openly admit discrimination is an issue because it’ll ultimately fall upon them to fix it. Furthermore, something that was quite surprising was that the allegations of housing discrimination against people with disabilities represented more than half of the complaints filed in 2014.

In Chapter 12 of Urban Issues, it is noted that in Detroit 67% of the people living there, live under the poverty line. One of the main reasons for this as discussed is because people aren’t earning enough to keep up with the cost of living. Hence, this leads into the topic of increasing minimum wage. Increasing the minimum wage has its pros and cons like everything else but it’s safe to say it’s necessary if for example in Detroit, half of the population is living in poverty. Yes, business owners rightfully earn their money because it’s their businesses but they can afford to spend more on labor to ensure that people have enough to survive. It was also quite surprising to see that anti-poverty programs account for only 1/6 of federal spending but yet lifted millions of Americans out of poverty. As much as anti poverty programs like social security and food stamps help people in need, the government should also put more funding into programs and initiatives that would prevent people from being at the poverty line in the first place.

I was unimpressed with this chapter.  To be frank I’ve been unimpressed with a large portion of the CQ reader, because it has seemed to conform to many of the party lines in its analysis, while not providing true innovative thought, which I was hoping it would.

While reading this chapter, I was appalled to learn of the proposals to solve the problem of urban poverty, the first always being better paying jobs. Furthermore, it is discussed that big business and the wealthy should intervene, and that federal housing may be able to solve the problem.  Quite frankly, I am of the belief that all these solutions would simply relocate the problem, or temporarily solve it. In my mind, the beginning to the road to real progress on the alleviation of urban poverty begins with the public schooling system, and the inconsistency with funding.  Anyone who feigns surprise when they hear of the one sidedness when it comes to funding for public schooling within the City should simply take a short trip to Brownsville-East New York,  or visit Clinton H.S. in the Bronx, and realize that there are real issues that many people seem to be ignoring.  A good friend of mine who I work with, born in raised in Brownsville, is the victim of this disparity of funding.  At 22 years old, I can vouch for his intelligence, but further vouch for his lack of education which has resulted in his caddying and working at a fast food restaurant as his chosen career paths.  And to some extent it is a shame, in that his brother is graduating with a bachelor in Accounting this year, while his educational past has led to a lack of prospects for his own future.  These types of narrative, of which I a personally aware of numerous, are the beginning of the issue with Urban Poverty in my mind.

I did think that the “Promise Zones” hold potential, but that the federal and state funds should be provided even more so to the public schools within these areas, to ensure students are given ample attention and materials in order to ensure that their needs are met.  If it is unclear, I am a believer that education is the key to a future of opportunity, and once funds are already being allocated, we must make sure that they are allocated to areas which would have true benefits for entire communities as well as individuals, not to mention America as a country, far into the future.

Urban poverty is a serious issue that has existed for years and will most likely exist for many years to come. Chapter 12 in CQ Reader discusses how urban poverty has come about and ways to combat it. As with every issue, it boils down to politics. Liberals want to have social programs and federal aid, while conservatives want the government to have a smaller role and individuals to take personal responsibility. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor, stated, “Economic theory says that the wage a worker earns, measured in units of output, equals the amount of output the worker can produce.” While this is simplifying the idea and there are other factors involved, there is truth to this statement. A worker can only be paid for what the value of their work is worth. I believe the best way to increase the value of a worker’s worth is through productive educational programing.

Richard Doar, a fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, explains that the importance of job training and educational programs that help prepare young people for work. Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, delved into the importance of programs to help people prepare and find jobs by providing job training and educational programs. He adds discouraging pregnancy outside of wedlock to his list of ways to aid society. While I disagree with that statement to a certain extent, I appreciate his clarification that it is an economic judgment and not a moral one. The bottom line is giving members of society the tangible tools that can help them succeed will do just that. As the Chinese proverb goes, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

As a society, we need to also help those who we may fear or have different feelings towards. Becky Pettit, a University of Washington sociologist, showed proof to the “prison to poverty” cycle. She showed how poverty lead to crime which leads to imprisonment. A vicious cycle that causes the rate of young African-American men who dropped out of high school and were in jail to almost quadruple. The Ready, Willing, and Able transitional jobs program is great way to help formerly homeless or incarcerated men have a second chance. In life we all make mistakes and it is important to have groups that are willing to help those that need it. A 2010 Harvard University studied showed that Ready, Willing and Able reduced reoffenders by 60 percent. This reminds me of a recent TED talk I watched. Adam Foss, a prosecutor, believes in the reallocation of prison funds to provide help for those who can benefit from programs to better their futures. Instead of throwing people in jail, Foss believes that providing proper education can help make society a better place. I agree with him and truly believe that he is changing the role of the prosecutor for the positive.

While reading this chapter, I couldn’t help but think about the nationwide concepts addressed in their relation to New York City. The discussion of federal housing programs and topics like the intersection of rental assistance and residential segregation is astoundingly apparent in NYC and, as someone dwelling in the suburbs of Long Island, I know it to be true that historical factors like “restrictive covenants [barring] minorities from moving into white neighborhoods” are a contributing factor to concentrated poverty in urban centers. Those who can, like my grandparents who moved from Queens, leave neighborhoods where there is less economic potential, and invest in property and other means to ensure the economic well being of their children. While there can be a discussion here about redlining, or about gentrification, I think that a number of my classmates have addressed those topics in intelligent and respectful ways. My takeaway from the information about urban poverty is to question the reasons that action to combat what the chapter refers to as, “deep, concentrated, and seemingly intractable” persistence of it.

Part of me wants to be hopeful about the commitment of the government to resolving pressing situations serving to entrap the urban poor. Rulings such as that by the Supreme Court in the 2015 case regarding the 1968 Fair Housing Act make me hopeful. However, I fear that the limited progress in mitigating the continuation of concentrated poverty will be heightened enormously with the actions to be taken by the new administration. Thinking to the words of the President, who claims that cities like Detroit and Chicago, centers of urban poverty, are a “mess” or a “disaster,” I have little hope that meaningful progress will be made to aid those trapped in conditions outside of their own making. In a way, I think it is possible that the focus on inner-cities (and the inherently racial assumption that the term denotes), though certainly valid and important, has the effect of producing apathy on the part of politicians. Admittedly, I subscribe to the (cynical/realist) view that most people are looking out only for their own self-interest, and I believe no subset of the population more in line with this view than the political elite. If this is the case, we must then ask what could make politicians care about urban poverty—what would make it in their self-interest to care? The answer, I think, could lie partly in linking urban poverty to rural poverty, creating a coalition of economically disparaged individuals whose votes could swing (national) elections in ways that perhaps monolithic coalitions could not. I realize that is is an incredibly Marxist view (the underclass rising up to defeat elite, exploitative rulers). But, in the current political climate (especially considering the role that economic inequality played in the Presidential election), can we afford to ignore a potentially beneficial coalition any longer?

Today’s state of urban poverty largely reflects a “hypersegregated” city environment. Many of the poor, especially black Americans, are living in slums and very poor neighborhoods where the opportunities for jobs and a good education are much reduced. The readings of “Housing Discrimination” and “Urban Poverty” do not only highlight these problems but present some significant suggestions for improvement. I believe that the suggestions should be applied on a multi-generational level, so that both parents and children can be simultaneously rescued from the gloomy existence of urban poverty and housing discrimination.

First, we must work on desegregating these urban poor or slum communities. The HUD’s new fair-housing law is a step in the right direction. Government- sponsored housing should not just be in poor urban areas where educational opportunities are significantly less available. Housing for the poor should be situated in middle-class and upper class- neighborhoods as well, so that children of poor households can experience great schools, educational programs, and libraries that may serve as catalysts to enable poor students to get off the vicious cycle of poverty and be informed and trained for  the great world of opportunities that exist. The way of the future is by working on the children, so that they are given a chance to succeed.

The other approach towards ending the spiraling state of urban poverty and housing is to help the parents pay for their overwhelming expenses. In addition to giving them the opportunity to live in nicer environments, parents should be paid more for the hard work they do, have consistent jobs that enable stables lives, and be given extra rewards for extra time on the job. These conditions can be met by programs that are currently in the process of being revamped and improved. These programs will seek to increase the minimum wage, change the rules of and guarantee overtime to all workers, and necessitate that all employees guarantee scheduling of regular job hours.

The government should play a bigger role in helping to provide for these services. It should also work with private industry, by creating monetary or tax incentives for the private sector to help create changes for the impoverished in society. It is incumbent upon all of us to improve the lives of the urban poor by extricating them from poverty and providing them with better housing. In so doing, we will be giving them what all of us have rights to: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

While reading this chapter, there was one thought that kept popping up in my head. Every time that the talk was shifted to minimum wage for lower level employees and training people how to do those jobs, I couldn’t help but feel that this is not the best way to address poverty. If anything, I think it might hurt in the long run.

The fact of the matter is that those lower level jobs that people want to try and help so much and becoming obsolete. The less ‘skill’ it takes to do a job, the easier it is to get some machine to do it. Eventually, technology will even take over jobs that require a lot of skill. That is just the direction that the world is heading in. So while you might be helping some of the people for the time being by raising they wages, it will do them no good in 5 years when a robot takes their job completely.

Since that is the case, I just felt like there should be more focus on alternative methods to reduce the enormous poverty level in this country; something that could have a lot more of a lasting impact then dealing with wages and training for jobs that might not exist soon. You could still focus on getting people in the workforce, because that is the best way to help get people out of poverty and out of trouble, but the focus should be geared in a different direction.

The main goal of this class is to solve social issues in New York City. One of the major issues in NYC is urban poverty. Since NYC is a metropolis with millions of people, there are always people that are not meeting the federal poverty line. According to CQ Researcher, “An estimated 45 million Americans have annual earnings below the federal poverty line- $24,250 for a family of four.” I am not personally surprise at this data. As a child from an immigrant family, this is the yearly earning for my family of three. But can you imagine going on budget from month to month and your parents do not dare to take a day off? This is the case or even worse for many more Americans. So what can we do to alleviate the urban poverty that is concentrated in many major cities?

The current minimum wage in NYC is $10.5 for a company under 11 employees and $11 for any company with more than 11 employees. Compare to the national minimum wage, NYC has much higher wage but the living expense is much higher. Housing expense in NYC usually takes more than one third of a family’s paycheck. This lead to hardship to afford necessities. Housing and Urban Development estimated that “… 12 million households pay more than 50 percent of their annual income for housing.” The other 50 percent must divide equally for food, clothing, transportation (please do not get me started with the rising fare with MTA) and medical care. It is hard to live a quality life with half of your paycheck going to a landlord or rental office. In order to help families, government should has more rent controlled or subsidized housing. NYC has great initiatives but they need to partner up with private sectors more. The supply cannot keep out with the demand. They wait line for subsidized is more than one year and there is income requirement. For families under the poverty line, they do not qualify for the nice subsidized housing. They can only live in housing project which are plagued with even worse poverty, gang violence, and drugs. The housing projects are not ideal for families with kids, but many can only live there because that’s all they can afford.

I strongly believe that urban poverty can be alleviate with the right employment training programs and support system. Incarcerated people are most prone to poverty because of their dirtied personal profiles. Especially for the colored people in the United States. From a study aimed for “prison-to-poverty” cycle, 37 percent of young African American men have gone to jail after drop out of the high school. This directly result in poverty increasing for colored people. Often time, these young men came from the housing projects. They live with their parents and bring more violence into the neighborhoods. The lack of job opportunities in the region without good transport systems around them. The young kids cannot see any good role models so they choose to join gangs to seek protection. The poverty cycle therefore continues. So to break this cycle, the government should lift the families out of the cycle with enhanced education opportunities. With better job training, parents can work in better job with better pay. With more income, they can move the family out of the housing projects into better neighborhoods with good public schools. This domino effect can bring the children to see positivity in this world and attain higher goals.