Christian Science Monitor Patrick Chisholm December 1, 2005
Big-government solutions pull poor people in, and push employers out.
A hurricane exposes the poverty of America’s inner cities, and the champions of big government make political hay out of it. Riots lay bare the underclass in Paris’s suburbs, and the French are astounded that such a thing could exist in their country.
In fact, Democrats have long controlled almost all of America’s inner cities. The Brookings Institution recently ranked the 50 largest cities in the United States according to their concentrations of poverty. A quick check reveals that the 10 cities with the highest concentrations of poverty have Democratic mayors, with the exception of New York City (whose Republican mayor is something of an anomaly in a Democratic-dominated city). By contrast, the few Republican big-city mayors hail mainly from cities with the least concentration of poverty.
This tells us that there is something terribly wrong with the statist policies that Democrats, and to an increasing extent Republicans, favor. The tragedy of the riots in France, where similar policies prevail, illustrates the same point.
The author is correct if he is referring to the poverty programs introduced by big city Democrats during of the nineteen-sixties. The most noticable and regretable legacy of these policies were the large, dilapidated, crime ridden public housing projects built in many cities where poor people on public assistance were concentrated and isolated from the life and economy of the rest of the city.
The public housing projects of Chicago, where I grew up, were truly scary places, where even the police seldom ventured, unless in large numbers. As late as 1993 you could ride the El train into downtown Chicago and see an amazing contrast. As you passed North Avenue, on one side of the tracks you would see the gentrified “Gold Coast” with it’s clean tree-lined streets, expensive cars, chic businesses and elegant residential townhouses and apartments. Then, by merely turning you head to the look to the other side of the tracks, you would see the vast, crumbling Cabrini-Green housing project – a depressing vista of cracked asphalt, broken glass, strewn garbage, rusted out, vandalized basketball courts, surrounding shabby, run-down gray, concrete, Soviet-style residential high-rises.
Thankfully many American cities, like Chicago, are now tearing down the projects, a move, which combined with welfare-to-work rules enacted in the nineteen nineties, is having a very postive impact in reducing urban crime and poverty. Sociologists have been puzzling over the decline in urban crime during tha last ten years, and it’s not unreasonable to argue that the reversal of the social programs of the nineteen sixties has played a role.
I won’t say that every policy that is indiscrimatetly included under the very broad label of “liberal” is necessarily bad. But the philosophy that called for warehousing poor people in housing projects and sustaining them with public assistance while doing nothing to help them become self-sufficient and escape that environment certainly was a monumental failure.
Most of young people are completly deconnected in french suburbs. Drugs, violence, poverty, no education, the list is very very long !
I am not sure there is still a hope to make them become good citizens. How will this part of society behave in the future ? It’s a bomb …