Race, Urban Poverty, and Public Policy Essay -- Urban Decay, Urban Poor

The problems of race and urban poverty remain urgent chall(a)enges which the United States has yet to address. Changes in the global economy, technology, and race relations during the refinement 30 years have necessitated new and innovative analyses and policy responses. A common thread which weaves throughout many of the studies reviewed here is the dynamics of migration. In When Work Disappears, immigrants provide comparative data with which to highlight the problems of ghetto poverty affect blacks. In No Shame in My Game, Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants are founder of the changing demographics in Harlem. In Canarsie, the possible migration of blacks into a working/ bourgeois neighborhood prompts conservative backlash from a traditionally liberal community. In Streetwise, the migration of yuppies as a result of gentrification, and the movement of nearby-ghetto blacks into these urban renewal sites withal invoke fear of crime and neighborhood devaluation among the gentrifying community. Not only is migration a common thread, but the persistence of poverty, despite the current economic boom, is the creation of all these works. Poverty, complicated by the dynamics of race in America, squall for universalistic policy strategies, some of which are articulated in myopic Support and The War Against the Poor. In When Work Disappears, William Julius Wilson builds upon many of the insights he introduced in The Truly Disadvantaged, such as the rampant joblessness, social isolation, and lack of mature males that characterized many urban ghetto neighborhoods. In the class discussion, Professor Wilson argues that it is necessary to break unemployment with joblessness, as the former only measures those still s... ...or-eliminating technology -- they are marvellous to be plausible policy alternatives in the current political and high-technology-oriented context. What all these analyses and policy recommendations do require is a universal istic strategy, backed by a broad-based multi-ethnic, multi-class coalition which cuts across ideological and political lines in clubhouse to address the problems of race and urban poverty at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Works CitedDavid Ellwood Poor Support Herbert Gans The War Against the Poor The Underclass and Antipoverty policy Notes1 Wilson, 28. 2 Ibid, 75-8. 3 Ibid, 216-18. 4 Newman, 292-293. 5 Rieder, 79. 6 Ibid, 173. 7 These definitions of social organization are also found in Wilson, 20. 8 Anderson, 144-45. 9 Wilson, 62. 10 Ibid, 113. 11 Ellwood, 238. 12 Gans, 110-112.