Urban Poverty And The Urban Underclass Essay - 939 Words

According to Curley (2005), urban poverty has been a huge issue for hundreds of years. The people living in inner-city neighborhoods were the primary target for poverty. It had a tremendous effect on the black population; it increased by 164 percent in ten years alone. Finding a job became hardly impossible. Therefore, neighborhoods began to segregate, leaving the disadvantaged poor behind. The neighborhoods relied on welfare to make ends meets. This resulted in an increase in crime rates (p.97). This paper was a view of how early ecologist viewed urban poverty. William Wilson’s thesis, The Truly Disadvantage, explained how social conditions led to the urban underclass. He enlightened the readers on how social isolation and concentration effects affected the inner-city neighborhoods. He reasoned that there were more jobs available in the suburbs than in inner-city neighborhoods. The jobs that were available required formal education and credentials, something the inn er-city residents lacked. The lack of education made it harder for them to get jobs. Therefore, the joblessness forced inner-city neighborhoods to start merging with lower, working, and middle-class black families. By the 1980’s the middle-class and the working-class had moved out the inner- city neighborhoods. Those who were left behind, Wilson referred to them as the urban underclass. The isolation between the groups left the underclass vulnerable (p. 98). On the other hand, Massey and Denton,Show MoreRelatedUrban Poverty: The Underclass Essay2609 Words   |  11 Pages In tackling the problem of urban poverty, William Julius Wilson calls for a revitalization of the liberal perspective in the ghetto underclass debate. He claims that liberals dominated the discussions with compelling and intelligent arguments until the advent of the controversial Moynihan report in 1965, which claimed that â€Å"at the heart of the deterioration of the Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family† (Moynihan), After that, liberals avoided any research that mightRead MoreThe Underclass Of The United States1449 Words   |  6 PagesAn underclass does not exist in the United States. It is a function of conservative’s imaginations. The relevance of their creating of an underclass serves one large purpose and that is to be an emotional ploy to keep people politically occupied with small issues. This allows corporations to ensure that their competition will be busy fighting other battles while they continue to push policy and laws that will represent the interests of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful. 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