There seems to be little evidence about the state of public housing that gave Goetz an overall positive impression. The mention of “quiet successes” and “loud failures” denotes social imbalance and the likelihood of destructive and disruptive events that occur in public housing environments gaining more attention than those casting an uplifting light over the community.
World War II and the United States commanding role as ‘The Arsenal of Democracy’ laid a direct pathway to the suburbs and out of public housing for working class White citizens, once the war ended. The VA and FHA gave priority to Whites that allowed them to move out of the cities in extraordinary numbers and into their own homes, giving rise to the term ‘White Flight’ among those in the housing and real estate marketplace. Cities with large Black populations saw strong surges in the White exodus from the inner city, especially when Federal programs supported urban renewal (demolishing slums, reducing industrial pollution, restoring and beautifying the ‘downtown’ areas of major metropolitan centers) and real estate developers were making
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“Public housing was not originally built to house the ‘poorest of the poor,’ but was intended for select segments of the working class (United States 1937; Bauman 1987; Atlas and Dreier 1992; Marcuse 1995). Specifically, it was designed to serve the needs of the ‘submerged middle class,’ who were temporarily outside of the labor market during the Depression.” wrote J.A. Stoloff in “A Brief History of Public Housing”. Stoloff sought to explain the true foundation of public housing, in it being primarily focused on middle class families whose economic status had been decimated by the Great
Overall, the federal government was never really hands on in housing, that changed in the 1930’s when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was created to be apart of the New Deal. After the Great Depression, the FHA sought to rebuild the housing market by introducing the mortgage lending system, that is still used today. The FHA actually did quite the opposite, “instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy”, that took advantage of racial covenants and insisted properties that were insured by them to use those covenants. The FHA introduced redlining policies in many American cities and with the Home Owners Loan Coalition (HOLC), a federally-funded program created to help homeowners refinance their mortgages, it seemed that it would never end.
In the book How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, Jacob describes in his book on the systems of tenants of housing had failed due to greed and neglecting wealthier people. Also he shows that a correlation between the high crime rate, drunkenness and reckless behavior from the poor and it also shows that they lack of owning a proper home. It mostly focuses on slum conditions of the lower East side of Manhattan, where many immigrants like Jews, Italians, Chinese, Germans, and Irish were packed in tenements. Many of them had no windows, no ventilation, and tried to prevent overcrowding, crime, diseases, filth and most of all poverty. He also exposes the kind of conditions poor people live in.
As Bauman et. al. argue in their essay “Public Housing, Isolation, and the Urban Underclass”, the federal public projects systematically disrupted the formation community by forbidding extended kin
James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds is a writer on topics of business, economics and finance writes for the magazine, The New Yorker. His article “Home Free?” published in 2014 considers a solution to chronic homelessness in the United States, a problem often deemed unfixable. Surowiecki adopts an unsympathetic and analytical method as he identifies his audience as financially stable and fiscally minded middle class readers. He uses a specific case study and evidence that has already shown to work in order to persuade the reader. Using real-life facts and results from successful social programs, Suroweicki probes his audience to evaluate the effectiveness of ‘Housing First,’ a approach that prioritizes providing people experiencing
Wealth is one of the factors why residential segregation is an increasing problem. Golash- Boza explains, “Residential segregation happened when different groups of people are sorted into discount neighborhoods” (271). It is because of housing segregation
I always wondered why in low income housing I was treated nasty. As my brother in law later explain it to us our family was called hood rich. Growing up I always remember all the amazing times we had as children. My father had a few holidays that he would so ostentatious with gifts and money. As a child I was self-assured that all my friends had the same joyous household.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary that explores public housing in Saint Louis, Missouri, in particular the history of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing project billed as the perfect solution in the early 1950s, to solve the problems of slums in Saint Louis and to bring people back into a city that had seen a population decline from previous years. Saint Louis was an ageing city desperate to regain their postwar prominence as a bustling city, but faced many challenges pertaining to the racial makeup of the segregated city and the loss of many jobs to suburban areas. Many whites had begun to participate in what is now referred to as “white flight”, or the migration of middle class whites to
The documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, asks the big question regarding this controversial housing project: why did it fall? The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was meant to help impoverished people. Through this, the housing committee wanted to provide a safe place for kids to play, families to live, and most of all allow the city of St. Louis to prosper. Instead of Pruitt-Igoe cleaning up the city and providing more job opportunities, it created concentrated poverty and hyper segregation. Along with these demographic factors, the lack of maintenance and end of World War II added additional pressures to Pruitt-Igoe.
Mantsios’ compares the profiles of different Americans lifestyles in his text and develops the idea that an individual’s class standing can affect their livelihood in detrimental ways, “The lower one’s class standing, the more difficult it is to secure appropriate housing, the more time is spent on routine tasks of everyday life, the greater is the percentage of income that goes to pay for food and other basic necessities, and the greater is the likelihood of crime victimization” (293). Mantsios explains that one’s class standing can affect the chances of survival and success. Ehrenreich describes her own housing experiences as a low income worker. To reduce her overall costs and to obtain a second job, Ehrenreich moves closer to Key West. Ehrenreich has just enough money to pay the rent and deposit on a tiny trailer at the Overseas Trailer Park.
Troubled Life during the Great Depression The prosperity of the 1920’s gave the American citizenry hope for better jobs, better pay and increased chances of prosperity. People were full of life as they could afford to pay for their basic needs, and even to keep a little money aside as savings. However, the Great Depression presented challenges that were difficult for the people to understand or deal with.
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted takes a sociological approach to understanding the low-income housing system by following eight families as they struggle for residential stability. The novel also features two landlords of the families, giving the audience both sides and allowing them to make their own conclusions. Desmond goes to great lengths to make the story accessible to all classes and races, but it seems to especially resonate with people who can relate to the book’s subjects or who are liberals in sound socioeconomic standing. With this novel, Desmond hopes to highlight the fundamental structural and cultural problems in the evictions of poor families, while putting faces to the housing crisis. Through the lens of the social reproduction theory, Desmond argues in Evicted that evictions are not an effect of poverty, but rather, a cause of it.
We see them as a crowd, we call them the homeless, as if it tells who they are. What most forget is that they are also people. These “people” with social disabilities or financial problems are abandoned by society and become homeless on the streets and although many believe they don’t owe anyone help. Homelessness is a very huge problem that America has come to face. Millions of people, including children, families, veterans, and the elderly live day after day without food, water, or a roof over their heads.
Housing wealth is disproportionate due to the fact the African American families parents and grandparents grew up in segregated areas where it was hard to gain any financial capital. According to the article in paragraph 5 Melvin Oliver claims that African
Public Policy on Housing Discrimination Executive Summary Housing discrimination and segregation have long been present in the American society (Lamb and Wilk). The ideals of public housing and home buying have always been intertwined with the social and political transformation of America, especially in terms of segregation and inequality of capital and race (Wyly, Ponder and Nettking). Nevertheless, the recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri and in Baltimore due to alleged police misconduct resulting to deaths of black men brought light on the impoverished conditions in urban counties in America (Lemons). This brings questions to the effectiveness of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in devising more fair-housing facilities (Jost).
Title: Gentrifying Chicago neighborhoods. General Purpose: To inform my audience of Gentrification in the Norther part of Chicago around the 1960s. Specific Purpose: At the end of my speech, the audience will understand the meaning of gentrification, how Puerto Rican families in the Northern part of Chicago lost their homes to Gentrification, how they fought against gentrification, and how gentrification is now occurring to Mexican families in the Southern part of Chicago. Thesis: Puerto Rican families lost their homes in the 1960s when Lincoln Park was gentrified despites their best efforts, and today Mexican families are losing their homes in Pilsen to gentrification. Introduction I. Attention: What would you risk in order to continue having a home?