Ghettos

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Ghettos

If it is true that the poor will always be with us, then, by extension, one can argue that ghettos, "the huts where poor men lie," to quote the poet Wordsworth, are equally eternal, a seemingly insoluble social problem with a long past. The word ghetto carries dark and distressing historical resonance for the Jews of Russia and Europe who, for centuries, culminating in the Nazi atrocities of World War II, were segregated into particular areas by governmental decree. The appalling living conditions that characterized these ghettos carried over to the modern United States, whose cities contain areas that exemplify the dictionary definition of a ghetto as "a densely populated area of a city inhabited by a socially and economically deprived minority." The existence of American ghettos, determined by specific social and economic contingencies, are also too often dictated by ethnicity, providing a disturbing echo of disadvantage based on race or color for those whose fate has confined them to ghetto conditions.

The ghettos of America began as virtual warehouses for cheap immigrant labor in the late nineteenth century, and evolved into holding pens for disadvantaged humanity, a lost and forgotten segment of the populace. Between 1970 and 1990, the number of persons living in ghettos grew by 92 percent, a figure that continued to rise throughout the 1990s. In this era of global economy, industrial flight threatens to turn not only cities, but also suburbs into new ghettos, which stand as a bleak testament to the vicissitudes of economic exigency that is fed by the manic flight of capital into and out of cities, and, finally, abroad.

Through the late nineteenth century, as coal and electricity supplanted water power, industry moved from riverside factory towns to cities. Proximity to markets, rail transport, and the availability of cheap labor provided economic incentives for the industrial migration, which gave rise to sub-standard housing for the work force built adjacent to the factories with little regard to hygiene or creature comforts. Hence, conditions were crowded and unsanitary. Nonetheless, the dreadful conditions that prevailed in these early ghettos were ameliorated somewhat by the strong social and cultural ties that held the immigrant communities together. For example, Yiddish newspapers and theaters thrived within the close confines of New York's lower East side in the early 1900s, while the 1920s and 1930s saw the process repeated in the black community of Harlem (where, incidentally, middle class Jews had moved to escape the confines of the East side), ushering in the artistic and intellectual burgeoning of the Harlem Renaissance. While the ghettos grew out of economic exploitation and crime flourished in their streets, they housed viable communities to whom the street became a meeting place for the people and an extension of the tenement apartments they occupied. Thus, the ghettos functioned as tight social entities that belied their external appearance of chaos and disorder.

As industry increasingly clogged the inner cities, wealthier residents sought escape from the noise and pollution, and thus began an exodus to bedroom communities outside the city proper. The poor filled the vacuum, occupying once upscale neighborhoods vacated by the affluent where mansions were turned into rooming houses and residential hotels. Bunker Hill, for example, with its stately Victorian mansions situated west of downtown Los Angeles, had been the premier neighborhood in the 1890s. But as the city encroached upon the area and its wealthy residents fled, the stately mansions were parceled into boarding houses for the poor and elderly, a process that repeated itself in every neighborhood adjacent to the downtown. Over time, these areas became not only physically dilapidated but also morally impoverished. Through newspapers, books—Raymond Chandler in particular, linked Bunker Hill with vice and depravity—and films, the association of ghettos with every manner of social ill spread through the public mind. During the 1940s and 1950s, film noir movies frequently used Bunker Hill locations as representative of an imaginary ghetto, a place blighted and beyond redemption. The process of ghettoization was not particular to Los Angeles, but typical of virtually every major American city.

Ironically, as congestion and union activism began to undermine the economic gains that had initially prompted industry moves to central cities, manufacturing, too, abandoned the city, relocating in the suburbs, and away from the threat of union activism. Then, too, the migration of African Americans and other people of color to the cities added to the disfavor in which ghettos were held. For European immigrants, ghettos had often been the first step in a trajectory that led to full assimilation. This could not be said of people of color, large numbers of whom have tended to remain economically, politically, and socially disenfranchised, creating a permanent underclass, trapped in a culture of poverty with few avenues of escape.

Stripped both of employment in industry, and the wealth-creating proximity of middle-class urbanites, poverty-stricken neighborhoods sank deeper into decline as a result of neglect and increasing crime. By the 1940s inner city decline had become a matter of paramount importance to the Federal government. Following World War II, urban theorists began mapping strategies to save the decaying inner cities or, alternatively, to contain the spreading contagion of poverty. Whole city blocks in inner cities were red-lined as slums, thus effectively depriving residents of bank loans, and were subsequently purchased under eminent domain laws, razed to the ground, and replaced by high-rise apartment buildings.

There were several reasons for this particular approach to the problem. It has often been asserted that these planners were utopians, wishing to overlay their international modernist vision on the inner city. In many cases they knew little about how neighborhoods operated, but these massive public works netted huge profits for large-scale contractors, while providing a short-term solution to a desperate housing shortage, and infused massive amounts of Federal funds into the local economy. Unfortunately, Project Housing, as it became known, failed to provide a convivial living environment, neither did they foster stable neighborhoods. The consequence of high-rise projects was further to contain and isolate disadvantaged groups from society at large, causing a concomitant rise in chronic unemployment, youth gangs, and crime—all of the ills, in short, that these projects had sought to eradicate. Neighborhood streets once lined with small businesses and apartment buildings were replaced by sterile plazas, arid and inhospitable; amenities that had once been close at hand now required a trip outside the immediate neighborhood, thus further disabling local economies and rendering them increasingly reliant on Federal assistance.

Racism was implicit in the planning of these massive construction projects, designed to contain and quarantine poor minority groups. Lewis Mumford once wrote that the function of a city street is "to permit … the greatest potential number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between all persons, classes, and groups." This was a view antithetical to the utopian planners. "In the view of the planners," writes Marty Jezer, "slums and overcrowding were the root cause of crime. The new high-rise red brick housing projects were seen as antidotes to crime, and this became their most spectacular failure." In San Francisco's Western Addition area, a bustling black neighborhood west of the civic center, more than 300 apartment buildings and small businesses were razed, replaced by barracks-like public housing. A functioning neighborhood was thus obliterated in the service of an idea, grim proof of the adage that sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Perhaps the most significant refutation of postwar urban policy was seen in the 1960s, and again in the 1990s, when overcrowding, misery, frustration, poverty, and despair erupted into riot and conflagration. By the 1990s, projects had become the breeding ground for a major escalation of the trade in and addiction to crack cocaine, with appalling social consequences. Projects have undoubtedly served to intensify African-American and Hispanic feelings of disenfranchisement, and can be pointed to as the match that lit the powder kegs of violence.

The monumental failure of public housing lay in its attempt to impose a bird's-eye view on social organizations without consideration for the lived experience at ground level. Caught in a spiral of increased public expenditure without the tax base to sustain them, many cities slipped into a long period of decline. In once thriving rust belt cities such as Detroit and Milwaukee, the entire inner city was in effect a ghetto, ringed by suburban bedroom communities. In addition, many inner city projects are being torn down, replaced by middle-income housing (the land is now too valuable to be occupied by the poor), and their former residents dispersed throughout metropolitan areas in a deliberate policy of "spatial deconcentration" intended to offset the possibility of further large-scale riots.

In the postwar era, the creation of ghettos could at times be attributed to the political disenfranchisement of poor people. Massive public works projects such as highways, freeways, and parkways could change a neighborhood from stability to impoverishment by destroying the built environment. Often political expediency rather than sensible and equitable planning determined the route of such public works. Robert Moses, the longtime planning commissioner of New York, leveled 54 six-and seven-story apartment buildings in East Tremont, a Bronx neighborhood inhabited by elderly Jews and Eastern Europeans, in order to build the Cross-Bronx-Expressway. Another route, which would have destroyed fewer residences, but not spared several commercial structures, was available, but the factory owners had the influence that the residents of East Tremont sorely lacked. Soon East Tremont became a no-man's-land of condemned apartments and vacant streets. Large swathes of the Bronx suffered a similar fate, making it one of the most desolate and inhospitable urban neighborhoods within the United States, and a reproach to the urban policies of modern America.

In the last three decades of the twentieth century, as the existence of ghettos proved an intractable problem, sociologists postulated various hypotheses to explain the ghetto. De-industrialization, industrial relocation, and neighborhood sorting (the tendency for minorities to leave a neighborhood once a certain economic status is reached) have all been offered as reasons for the proliferation of ghettos in the postwar period. "Neighborhood poverty is not primarily the product of the people who live there or a ghetto culture," writes sociologist Paul Jaworsky, "but the predictable result of the economic status of the minority communities and the degree to which minorities are segregated from whites and from each other by income." The problem has been further exacerbated by gentrification (the reclamation of inner city housing by middle-class whites) on the one hand, and further spatial isolation on the other. Indeed, the more desirable inner-city locales become, the more impacted the plight of the poor. The result has been intermittent rioting and a culture of desperation. Nevertheless, the by-products of ghetto culture—gangster rap, drugs, clothing styles, and drugs—find ready buyers in white, middle-class America. This is perhaps the greatest paradox of the ghetto, that while experiencing almost total disenfranchisement, the music, fashions, and ethos of its inhabitants had come to dominate the trendy styles of the late-twentieth century.

With the present-day policy of destroying the high-rise projects, combined with the cessation of welfare, the ghetto stands to become a much more mobile phenomenon, a ghetto made of shopping carts, cars, vans, and prison cells. The criminalizing of larger sectors of the population is one of the more obvious consequences of the "War on Drugs," which is in effect a war on the urban poor. Forty years of government policy has done little to ameliorate the problem of the ghetto. If anything, the problem has been exacerbated by Federal intrusion. One is finally drawn to the inescapable conclusion that, unless society finds the will and the means to educate and employ all its members, it will continue to be plagued by a permanent and destabilizing underclass.

—Michael Baers