Efficacy

Norman Street largely reaffirmed my ideas about cycles of urban poverty. The way the text followed the personal lives of low-income resident gave faces to general phenomena of which I was already aware. Perhaps most compelling were the details of the manipulation of the people of Norman Street by members of the educated middle class. Such exploitative relations are not uncommon today, but the specificity of concrete examples proved more alarming than general, somewhat vague thoughts on the matter. It was also interesting to learn about the large extent to which at times petty interpersonal relations shape the external efficacy of community organization, and also how internal efficacy plays into this. I was surprised by the relative insignificance of the tenants’ association in the book, as it played a large role in the film watched in class. Perhaps the difficulty the residents of Norman Street faced in efficiently organizing even a small group of people is to blame for this. Norman Street brought to light both the shortcomings of the area’s inhabitants and the conditions that kept them down.