Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected.
-American Murder Mystery, TheAtlantic.com
A long article, but an important story regarding public poverty policy. I hadn’t read anything that articulated this before, and it explains what I’ve seen happen to Madison over the last 15 years. I feel so uneducated about the issues surrounding poverty, that I don’t even know what to say about it. If decades of government neglect followed by another decade or so of government intervention have failed, what can we expect in the future? We can’t just give up.
I don’t have any answers, of course. My only suggestion would be to de-fund our anti-narcotics programs and spend that money better elsewhere. But that’s my solution for everything.
2 Comments
Your suggestion is certainly a quality default. The two main faults at work here are both mentioned in the article: the projects were incredibly tight communities, (if noones done sociology on them they’re missing the boat) and that support was lost as the individuals were isolated into hostile territory, so yeah. Incidentally, bowdlerizing a powerful poem to fit the marketing strategy of your brave new dream is so typical of this kind of historically doomed effort. AND you are not going to fix one of the four main human plagues with a single-pronged drive. These folks would have had to address jobs, education, transportation - etc.
I’d like thinking on this to run contiguously with the concept of de facto decentralization, if you can go with me for a minute here, and granjon’s point that cities outlast nations. I’ll have to look it up, and I’m drastically late for work. But I think it was Susan B Anthony? Hope House? As I recall, that did ok, and was well thought out. Thanks for posting this. More to come.
Jane Addams, Hull House. I don’t know where Susan B came into it but I think they were buds. The Familistere of Andre Godin: if you’re going to do Victorian engineering you have to do it very, very meticulously, you apparently have to stay with it for at least a generation, you have to recognize that it’s going to change dramatically as soon as you leave it, and direct the legacy as carefully as you directed the setup.
In general, though, the prosperity of the prosperous -that’s usn’s - has been sustained - the Ayn Rand argument is is it otherwise impossible to create- by -insert Marxist glossary- oppressing the -well, the oppressed, in a nutshell, the poor, and it really is only going to last so long. I mean, we do have a condition of empire going on, and we have some recognizable symptoms of an empire in some poor health, and EVENTUALLY this empire is going to collapse. Now, how long we can limp along, nobody knows, could be another five or six hundred years on the verge of collapse. I’m just saying maybe if we took the whole empire thing back a few notches, empowered the more local/regional administrations, it could happen without as much freaking out and nightmares. But as long as you have a bunch of people enjoying more scarce resources than is their share to go around, you’re going to have a bigger bunch of people not having enough, personality flaws aside.
Holy Hannah I talk too effen much - now you know why I lurk. I warned you though.