Urban Struggles: A Personal Journey Through Poverty

Growing up in the ghetto, riding public transit to get everywhere, and going to public school forced me to see a great many things my environmental peers will never see first hand. I saw homeless people sleeping on the train, to get out the rain and thunder, as I rode but from my job at a grocery store in a ghetto that was not my own. I would wait until I got home from school to eat anything from kindergarten to eighth grade, and grew up as a fat kid, because the food I had at home from unhealthy. I personally took pleasure out of eating junk food out of vending machines in my high school, instead of eating the “healthy” garbage public school provided. I remember what parts of my city looked before urban renewal. I know that people lived next

Instead those upper middle class white millennials will re-urbanize. The re-urbanization trend of millennials has already displaced low-income/ people of color from apartments and “ghetto” rentals that their grandparents were forced into, but that have become hubs of culture. Urban renewal. Gentrification. Evictions. Whatever you call this process of cultural degradation is a process that is happening (Smith 2002). It is pointing out health disparities between the poor people that are inevitably push and the upper class people taking that

Whether you are rich or poor, fast food is bad for you (Alter and Eny 2005). The quantity of fast food one consumes is of course important, but the super-sized nature of these foods and relative ease at which one can buy a lot of fast food does not help the consumer (Stender 2007). But it is part of Americana. Fast food organizations plan where their franchises are built. McDonald’s explicitly stated that they wanted a McDonald’s “within a 3- to 4-minute trip for the average American” (Lubow 1998). An American Journal of Public Health study found fast-food restaurants to be fairly evenly dispersed across predominantly white and African-American neighborhoods (Morland 2002). There are many things wrong this anyone who makes arguments about fast-food based on this study. One, the United States is literally more than black and white. Two, that same study explicitly says “Our findings underscore the importance of including characteristics of individuals’ local food environments into future studies to gain a better understanding of barriers to healthy eating” (Moreland 2002). Indeed, even if one over simplifies the United States’ population to black and white, one cannot ignore other factors that might make these black citizens more susceptible to the increased fast food consumptions. These factors where laid out by Naa Oyo A. Kwate in 2006 – “money, power, prestige, and social connections” (Kwate 2006). He explains why these factors have