The Heart of the Ghetto

At the heart of poverty and the site of the highest rates of crime like murder and robbery lie urban ghettos with project 8 housing where the poorest people are packed together. In a way these people are forced to stay there as these project housing areas are the only affordable option that they have. Some of the poorest people live there with no education; no health care and this make a volatile situation. These people are so crammed together that people have to sleep in the dirty hallways like animals. It is not surprising that people want to stay away from this section 8 housing due to the dangerous conditions that so many people are crammed into. Many times these housing complexes are torn down only ten or twenty years after they are put up because the conditions in them get so bad that crime rates are ridiculously high and cities are forced to remove them. How do these poverty and crime concentrated zones come to form in the first place? With economic effects like factories moving and a loss of jobs people are stuck below the poverty line. Then with the government’s construction of these extremely cheap housing units this led to the poor swarming to one location thus creating a disproportionate concentration of people. The out migration of the middle class from the city left the underclass in even high concentrations and the poverty that started in the section 8 housing areas spread outward from there.

            With wealth one has access to many resources right? So with no wealth one has no access to resources and nobody within these project housing areas had wealth which meant no social and other resources to the people of this community. Education is an important social resource that teaches us the skills we need for our future and there is a lack of education within these ghettos. In the video we saw in class kids were just playing basketball at the park instead of going to class. At first I thought why wouldn't they want to better themselves and escape this never ending cycle? But then I thought that in this poverty stricken areas most of the schooling systems don’t have the necessary resources that are needed to properly educate the kids. If even the kids don’t get the tools they need for their future then what is the point of going? Less emphasis is put on school for future generations only further advancing this cycle of poverty. Until proper community resources are in place and the people in these poverty concentration zones realize they are and utilize the free resources the cycle will continue. Kids start selling drugs or hustling to provide what little they can for their family because this is the only thing they know thanks to growing up in this ghetto.

            Crime rates are the highest in the nation in these concentric zones and we know why but the problem is fixing the problem. These concentric zones of poverty only add to the crime levels. People packed together creates stress between them cause violence and other types of crime. Gangs cause the highest murder rates in cities like Chicago as they have conflict over territory and selling drugs while others with no jobs seek to fill their pockets with money so they turn to theft and robbery. Chicago has the eighth highest six year average when it comes to murder rates. For every 100,000 people about 26.2 are murdered in Chicago according to this six year average. These projects like Cabrini-Green in Chicago house some of the cities most violent criminals and gang members. In these jobless areas crime is highest because the people are desperate and look for anyway to make ends meet. In 1984 the black white unemployment ratio was 2.2 blacks for very one white person and from 1970 to 1984 jobs that require only high school education were lost and jobs needing higher education moved to the cities. Not only were the poor concentrated into one area they were not given any jobs to keep them afloat. In addition to crimes of theft, a lot of violent crimes come from gangs and drug dealing, which tend to form because of broken homes which are a side effect of these densely populated ghettos. What would one do in order to survive? Bad living conditions and overall environments will have results like this it is clear. The crime rates, lack of education and social resources, and extremely poor living conditions are simply because of the high concentration of some of the poorest people in the country.