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?