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Originally Posted by LouisVanDerWright
Well they can stop promoting instability in families to start. The War on Drugs and the "Great Society" welfare programs basically did in the idea of the nuclear family for poor inner-city familes. As noble as providing poor mother's with aid and food is, it also eliminates their reliance on having a stable male spouse to provide. Combine that with locking half the men in some communities up for having a joint on them and you've got the mess we have today.
The fact of the matter is that gentrification is the single greatest force disrupting entrenched poverty in America today. These marginalized, segregated, ghettos need to go. I don't mean that the people there need to be forcibly moved, I mean that the areas need to be integrated at all costs. The best thing that can happen to a poor family stuck in the poverty trap is to move somewhere like Des Moines IA where the unemployment rate is 2.5% and they are literally begging people to move there. Ames IA is at 1.5% and is desperately trying to fill their shortage. Compare this to Chicago segregated neighborhoods where unemployment is 25-50%.
I have a friend who actually works at a large property manager and development non profit that specializes in HUD/Section 8 housing in Des Moines. Half of their clients/tenants are essentially refugees from these areas in Chicago and a large number of them actually move out of these units after 4-5 years when they have had a stable job for a few years. Des Moines had 25 murders last year in a city of 200k. That's high historically for Des Moines and pretty much isolated to carryover violence largely among migrants from Chicago or similar Urban areas.
The best possible thing we can do is move some more wealthy residents into these areas and move some poor residents into wealthy areas. The government should be promoting this flow and helping people make that transition. But of course then politicians don't want their voters moving away so they portray the process as the great Satan...
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I went to Iowa State which is in Ames. I think when I was a senior, there was kind of an influx of people from Chicago from some "not so good areas." I remember there was a little increase of crimes like armed robberies and people were starting to get worried as the community was very low crime, and it was kind of a sudden increase. I don't think it really "spiraled" out of control or anything though. Still low crime and everything and it was already a really low crime place (outside of a few fights here and there, and many an underage drinking charge). Actually I have really "great" memories of my drunk, idiot friend (who comes from an upper middle class family in India and thinks he's entitled to everything) bumping into a group of people who had just moved from Chicago on the sidewalk while he was walking very drunk. They of course wanted to start a fight with us 3 on 2- my friend who was a boxer (and not necessarily small) the entire time yelling at them "F*CK YOU! I'M GONNA F*CK YOU UP SO MUCH YOUR OWN MOM CAN'T RECOGNIZE YOU!" Really fun diffusing that situation, haha..