Problems in Poverty Stricken Areas

            When looking at the high crime rates that are associated within urban communities, it can be shown that many factors such as income, job availability, education, race, class, etc play major parts in how a community is shaped.  All of these issues all tie into why communities are the way they are in the first place.  Many low-income communities are faced with no chances of improvement due to the fact that there are very little to no middle class people within their communities.  A big problem today is how these poor communities are concentrated with other low class people.  Since this is what is happening it then does not allow the community to grow, as people tend to stay away from these particular neighborhoods.  This then leads to many jobs decreasing as the population that is working class seeks other communities for better opportunities.  This is where the term de-industrialization comes into affect where this explains how the companies isolate themselves from poverty stricken neighborhoods.  As de-industrialization grows, population then decreases.  When communities go through depopulation, people may leave but the poverty population increases.  For example, Wilson (1987) uses the example where he looked at five major cities, which included Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia and then noted that although the populations did decrease by 9%, the poverty population percentage increased by 22%. So, even though many people left these areas the poor population still increased.  This shows how these areas are dealing with major problems where they don’t have the necessary tools to get better as a community.  Seeing this I believe that it then leads to a domino effect where without these businesses being in these communities it then leads to lack of jobs and from the lack of jobs then leads to poor housing and people trying to survive by other means and so on. 

This then can help explain how the education systems in these communities also tend to be terrible.  Reverting back the small clip we watched in class as the guy interviewed people that lived in a poverty area in Chicago, he stumbles across a bunch of kids that should be in school playing basketball instead.  Then talking to some of them as well as surrounding adults learned that the kids didn’t go to school because they believed that it was a pointless act for them to do.  This can be the case in some poverty stricken areas where the education may be so poor or the resources surrounding these kids are so scarce it thus reverts them into accepting that it can’t change for them.  From this it can then be seen and assumed that many of these kids revert to joining gangs or dealing drugs in order to feel more connected or to survive in these communities.  This is where I believe the biggest problem can start from when it comes to crime in these neighborhoods.  When you have children and teens’ dealing these drugs out to people it just causes more crime in these areas.  Seeing this, then comes the question in where are the families for these kids? Or what situations can truly cause them to revert to this kind of behavior?
 Well as these neighborhoods gain poverty from lack of jobs they then lead to having cheap housing such as section 8 housing where they have people live in them for very cheap prices.  Although it may be cheap housing for people it is also a problem because these are the main areas where crime can occur within the city.  By having cheap housing it is basically allowing people to live for cheap prices and spend money more of their money on things such as drugs.  Seeing that this may not be the case for most people in these areas it is still a major problem because people also pack the hallways and sleep in them which causes more problems in these section 8 houses.  Many of them in fact because of this tend to close down because of the terrible conditions of which the people leave them and live in.             Overall crime is big in these poverty stricken areas for many of the reasons as I suggested previously.  From here then how can they get better is the biggest question.  By having poor people living with poor the situation is at its worst where opportunities’ for money in a community lack.  Thus leading to fewer resources for all the people living in them.  Chicago is one of the worst when it comes to violence and crime due to these poverty areas.  By continually having the poor concentrated and surrounded by poor it will only cause more crime in these areas.  So as this happens high crime rates will continue to follow in pursuit.

Wilson, William J. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1987. Print.