Who knew?
Is Ending Segregation the Key to Ending Poverty?Chicago's experiment in relocating poor African American families to rich white suburbs seems to be a success. So why are so few other cities doing the same?February 4, 2015 Like many mothers raising children in Chicago's housing projects in the 1990s and 2000s, Seitia Harris was afraid of the drugs and violence that were pervasive in the neighborhood where she lived, Altgeld Gardens on the city's South Side. She made sure to provide her three children with every opportunity she could, taking them to ballet lessons, after-school academic programs, plays and activities around the city, encouraging them to work hard at school and stay away from drugs. But the specter of violence and poverty was hard to escape.
Hard to escape, that is, until Harris got an opportunity to move out of the projects to a small village called Alsip, 40 minutes outside of Chicago's city center and 80 percent white. Harris moved to Alsip 14 years ago and since then has led a quiet, suburban life alongside neighbors who go to work each day and raise their children to go to college.
Harris and her children thrived in Alsip. One of her daughters just graduated from college with a double bachelor's degree in business administration and early childhood education, another is in a bachelor's program for nursing and works as a manager at a McDonald's while she attends school. As for her friends who stayed in Altgeld Gardens, Harris told me, "their children have children. My children don't."
There are hundreds of programs that seek to improve the outcomes of people who live in concentrated poverty. But as Harris and thousands of other mothers like her have demonstrated over the past half century, one of the most effective strategies for lifting families out of poverty is to plunk them down in a completely new neighborhood far away from their past lives.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/next-economy/big-questions/is-ending-segregation-the-key-to-ending-poverty-20150204What about the one's left behind in concentrated poverty? The gang bangers? The shooters? The children living in dysfunctional families?
Where is the program for poor white people? At times, progressives are quick to point out that by numbers, not percentages, there are more white people on welfare. Where is the program to lift poor whites out of poverty?
What about the long term changes in the receiving communities? More or less crime? People safer?
Is every family in these programs successful? What about the failures?
Where are the jobs? Past generations lifted themselves out of poverty with good jobs. People of all colors created good safe neighborhoods.
60's 'white flight'? A white person excluding blacks due to poor credit and destroying property would be called a racist. How often were white views on new black neighbors ever explored? Would you be moving away if your neighbor was white? Why or why not? Can you explain? Hmmm...they throw their garbage in the back yard, they put their TV on the porch, it's loud and they don't turn it off at night, they don't work and are a bad influence on my family and children, they are destroying the property, I'm afraid to leave my house due to the kind of people hanging out in that house all hours of the day...
Why aren't good people of all backgrounds allowed to find a safe family friendly place to live? Why are 'rich' white neighborhoods always the target?
Why didn't they refer to that girl who left the white school as a 'racist'? It seems easy for some to make excuses for blacks that they would never make for non-black under the same or similar circumstances. Non-blacks seem to be instant 'racists'.
What about the leftovers? The one's left behind? How do you fix life for good people trapped in those bad neighborhoods?
just my humble opinions
