The Pros And Cons Of Urban Renewal

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With respect to housing, Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton name programs of urban renewal, and suburban zoning laws, as two principal factors that are responsible for the abject conditions black residents face in “ghettos” (Ture and Hamilton 156). Urban renewal is a process by which poor (and usually black) residents of an urban area are forcibly evicted and relocated, so as to facilitate the return of wealthy (and usually white) residents. Ture and Hamilton note that in an eastern urban area of St. Louis called Mill Creek, “a black slum was cleared and in its place rose a middle-income housing development” (Ture and Hamilton 156). This process inevitably exponentiates the crisis of overpopulation in the remaining black ghetto areas. Likewise, …show more content…

As aforesaid, the segregation that pervades public schools in many inner cities translates into much lower quality of education therein. As a consequence, students either drop out before they’ve finished high school, or graduate with an inadequate education. For example, Ture and Hamilton note that in Central Harlem (where the schools are overwhelmingly black), up to 41% of new high school students will drop out and not graduate (Ture and Hamilton 159). Additionally, the hypercompetitive job market that exists in the hyperdense urban areas further compounds the difficulty of securing a job. Secondly, those born in these impoverished urban areas are congenitally deprived of opportunities for well-paying, secure jobs. Their families’ financial situations oftentimes pressure them to drop out of school and take up a minimum wage, dead-end job, as it were. When one couples poverty with an insufficient or incomplete education, it becomes virtually impossible for those individuals to go to college. Thus, they’re relegated to a low-paying, insecure job that keeps them and their future generations in poverty, undereducation, and joblessness in

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