Proposed Solutions to Poverty: Analysis and Reflection

Introduction

Grappling with the subject of urban poverty entails a vast range of effects and counter-effects that involve various aspects of economics, politics, race, social division, environment, crime, and a host of inter-competing catalysts. For every proposed solution there are a set of specific obstacles and political complications. Urban poverty in America is one of the most contentious social and political subjects because of the impact that it has on quality of life issues, HIV/AIDS, racial politics, and the progressive drift toward urban concentration. Part of the difficulty in confronting urban poverty, or proposing feasible solutions, is the circulation of a number of myths that serve to further complicate or simplify the realities. The subject is complex and multifaceted and the often blunt dispositions associated with urban poverty in media and entertainment stereotyping of fomenting broad misconceptions. Perhaps primary among the dispensations for poverty are that the demographic in question is static, void of the active motivations to lift themselves up. This depiction of urban poverty has gained wide acceptance, and yet its inaccuracies and predilections go unchallenged for the most part.

The facts are often quite at odds with the ideas that hover around the subject of urban poverty and the environment it breeds. There are critical questions of education, jobs, infrastructure, community safety, social aspects, and emergent crime. Social and economic assimilation is key to the strategies to combat urban poverty however the approach to take in implementing this assimilation is the stumbling block. The intensification of urban poverty over the last decade remains an increasing problem in many of the largest cities in America, with concomitants of violent crime, unwanted children growing up in poverty, and rampant drug abuse and alcoholism compounding the problem.

A primary component in any serious attempt to attenuate urban poverty is creating jobs as a means of offsetting alternative and unproductive activities associated with poverty. A high-impact jobs program at the urban levels would alleviate a number of the issues traditionally associated with poverty, such as public assistance and dependency, and the erosion of personal motivators like pursuing education as a means of upward mobility. Jobs will act as a catalyst for further improvements in the social and economic conditions under which poverty thrives and embeds. Providing meaningful alternatives to what may appear to be a static set of conditions can and does empower people, just as the lack of alternatives can produce crime and drug abuse. Exploring workable solutions to urban poverty also entails an examination of the roots of poverty and the social and economic factors that embed these roots and cultivate them ( Hilfiker 2003 ). Poverty engenders attitudes and reactions that are largely harmful and unproductive, there is a collective sense of abandonment and persecution when contrasted with other more developed demographics. Diffusing this anger and hopelessness also demands solid solutions.

By focusing only on the economic aspects of urban poverty and dismissing the personal impact and the attitudes inherent in that impact the prescriptions to solve it will lack the necessary force. There is an entire unexplored social sphere within the phenomenon of urban poverty, in many respects the negative attitudes—acceptance, criminal behavior—are cultivated alongside other prevalent factors. Developing a coherent strategy for alleviating poverty in dense urban concentration demands a dual understanding of the environment: an economic structuralism and a prevalent psychology that has adapted to its environment in a host of negative and self-reinforcing ways ( Wilson 1997 ). Only by striving to understand how to alleviate the economic obstacles alongside the socially adapted attitudes that accompany poverty is there any chance of enacting significant change.

Perceptions of the segment of the population that experiences urban poverty are also skewed toward race and other problematic factors without sufficient explanations. Poverty is a symptom and like most symptoms, it contains a set of causes and growth components. Surface depictions of urban poverty tend to the one-dimensional inasmuch as they posit an implied disposition as well as a false determination to change. There is a relevant mapping of cause and consequence that informs the patterns of urban poverty however the impact that makes attitudes are the surfaces, the crimes and the dependency on overburdened social safety nets. Demystifying urban poverty demands education and concern, left to fester and grow the phenomenon will only get worse ( Howard 2003 ). Devising productive and high-impact solutions means confronting embedded prejudice as well as political apathy, to the extent that urban poverty resists the weak prescriptions undertaken to alleviate it the issue is often consigned to political rhetoric at the local or state levels. Only by radically shifting the dialogues and the approach is there a practical lesson for addressing the problem.

The important questions that should accompany any discussion of inner-city poverty and the environment that surrounds it are often entirely missing, instead a set politically expedient palliatives further obscure the real issues that are petitioning for address. Empty political slogans like ‘The War on Poverty’ produce negligible results. Confronting the issue in terms of both scale and necessary resources is the only feasible approach. The rhetorical disconnect between political posturing and actual impact-policies at the grassroots level is significant. In recent years there has been no genuine political will to address or alleviate intensifying urban poverty or the cancer of crime and static lifestyles that emerge from it. Framing poverty in a coherent dialogue and taking the necessary steps to provide meaningful and detailed alternatives can mean the difference between misguided expenditures and federal of state allocations well-spent and directed to the neediest areas. The conclusion is that poverty occupies a low priority politically, in spite of routine references to ‘cures’ and job programs for the poor ( Kemp-Graham 2013 ). Given the resources available in this the single richest nation on earth the issue of inaction on the growing levels of urban poverty can only signify one thing: a failure at the federal level to address the issue, organize open forums for community solutions, and put aside enough federal dollars to infuse into the most egregious areas as test-cases.

When considering the vast amounts of federal dollars that are wasted in less important areas the possibility of earmarking enough money for an ambitious and effective strategy to alleviate urban poverty in a phased approach, with essential benchmarks has not really been experimented with for what can only be a lack of political will. This doesn’t make any fiscal sense at all when considering the compounded costs of poverty-born urban crime and subsequent incarceration. The dismal fact is that there have been no significant changes in government policies toward chronic poverty in decades. Investing in programs to alleviate urban poverty and promote education-based alternatives have a number of obvious benefits, primary among these benefits are stronger local and state economies, enhanced tax-base, rising property values, better schools and a host of other immediate improvements. Failure to implement relevant and long-term anti-poverty policies where they are most critical is a form is intentional deterioration and neglect ( Ludwig, Duncan & Hirschfield 2001 ). Political apathy toward urban poverty has the effect of cultivating it along with the social ills that accompany it. At the state and federal levels this is not merely an oversight, but a crime of omission that exacts an impact on everyone. The price of urban poverty is the cumulative quality of life for the expanded community.

Common sense strategies to alleviate urban poverty would ideally be overlapping: primary to this is an active job-program that offers urban youth a viable outlet to generate income and spend it in the local economy. A long-overdue raise in the minimum wage to a living standard would also have an enormous impact on inner-city poverty. Because the issue of urban poverty is largely misunderstood by brevity-driven media depictions and the surface imagery of squalor and concentrated crime the issues suffer from a set of blunt definitions that fail to relay the entire story. Not unlike other social and economic phenomena urban poverty entails an environmental psychology as entrapping and often myopic as the one-dimensional perspective that dismisses it. Inner-city poverty lines are often measured in terms of family income and a set of less relevant variables ( Mitlin 2004 ). Poverty reduction issues don’t simply focus on income as a panacea but address the prevalent psychology of hopelessness and internecine violence that are notable concomitants of the problem.

Comprehensive policies are missing because there is a lack of comprehensive information at state and federal levels, and because urban poverty reduction is invariably coding for minorities. Acknowledging political apathy, or worse, political inconsequence, renders a mandate for disinterest and inaction, and this has been the case for decade after decade. Where grassroots organizations and community movements benefit from an organic understanding of the complexity of the issue, they lack the monetary resources to fund significant development programs that could prove viable ( Desmond 2012 ). Like any unresolved socioeconomic problem an honest effort requires sober analysis and comparison, a series of impact recommendations whose essential designs are not weak palliatives or slogans, but rather dynamic work-based solutions with a design theory can be readily tested for results. The issue is not beyond resolution, it merely requires a commitment that governments refuse to prioritize.

Income-based poverty lines only define poverty on a very narrow economic scale and do not address the relevant social concomitants that form around concentrated urban poverty. By looking at the issue along these lines key components of the problem are politically trivialized or dismissed entirely. Essential basic-needs measures are not factored into these determinants for the poverty line, not are relevant social behaviors that invariably follow. By treating the subject more or less as only an economic consideration an injustice is done not only to those who suffer long term urban poverty but also in the weak or inadequate policies drafter to address it. Public housing and assorted state and federal subsidies are not practical measures for eliminating long-term poverty, and in many cases, they merely prolong it to the extent that there are no catalysts or motivators once basic subsistence is attained ( Mitlin 2004 ). Providing housing and public subsidies should include practical incentives for upward mobility. Conditions imposed on subsidies would incentivize mobility.

For decades the entitlements available to the urban poor merely became a permanent support-system because of inherent design flaws in the programs. Without incentivizing the entitlements the recipients were not compelled to rise out of the conditions they lived under. Had these programs been actively monitored and incentivized there may well have been a significant impact over several decades ( Haugen & Boutros 2014 ). What is remarkable is that the failure of this entitlement system was left unchecked for decades, producing a cyclical effect from generation to generation, without any significant improvement in the demographic. Eventually, there were heated political calls to terminate an entitlement system whose essential defects never entered the argument. With a dynamic overhaul and reapplication, the system could have been incentivized and made to work for the neediest of the urban poor. The tragedy is that this termination of a bad system created the perception that the problem was insurmountable. This assessment could not be farther from the truth, instead of acknowledging the design flaws of the entitlement programs policymakers tacitly dismiss the issue as futile.

An ambitious two-pronged approach merging state and federal government and localized NGO’s with organic attachments to the communities targeted could make a significant impact where poorly arranged and executed federal programs have failed dismally. By attaching critical incentives to any housing or financial assistance instead of simply providing stationary subsidies for immobility a system of active participation can be established between the targeted demographic and the agencies offering assistance. An intricately designed and implemented jobs program at the community level could petition local merchants and businesses to hire within the community on the condition that the agency can offer direct incentives to the business owners in the form of tax-relief or targeted abasement based upon hiring quotas ( Howard 2013 ). The second prong of the strategy would be educational incentives offered through job-training and participation in the program. Job counseling and other localized guidance programs could be established to address a number of associated issues including day-care and tuition-assistance.

Community leaders and activists could be drawn into the effort through substantive integration of federal and local authorities. By merging the relief agencies into a common authority in which varied components act in accord or within an ascending hierarchy the lag-areas and typical bureaucratic inefficiency could be minimized at the impact levels. Simply earmarking federal or state dollars without a coherent implementation strategy is a recipe for disaster, as past entitlement programs clearly indicate. All significant expenditures should correctly be subject to scrutiny and routine review to make determinations as to the effectiveness of the money spent. Where money is not well spent, structural adjustments in specific areas are necessary. A well-rounded template would involve appropriations, targeted service sectors, comprehensive social-work, job counseling, aid-incentives, educational supplements, project accounting reviews, progress-monitoring, and key oversight structures at local and federal levels.

Approaching urban poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon and not an attenuated political issue can mean the critical difference between poorly directed millions and money that is strictly accounted for in every respect. Certainly, the billions of dollars spent on misdirected urban poverty programs over the past five decades could have produced dramatically different outcomes had the money been more intelligently dispersed and accounted for. Job programs that lack an organic connection to the community are destined to fail because they are not geared to engage those they are directed to. Setting up a jobs program that will show result entails going into the community in an interpersonal sense and not merely touting a political construct with little probability of attracting participants ( Howard 2013 ). Organizers need to penetrate the community in meaningful ways, engaging those they seek to help and taking crucial steps to explain and demystify the proposals and the aid, and how these opportunities will be offered, as well as what is expected in return.

Requiring a radical new approach to federal and state efforts to alleviate concentrated urban poverty is the irreducible action that is now demanded after so many well-intentioned but sloppily implemented efforts have fallen by the wayside. The approach that is outlined here stands a significantly higher chance of success because it takes into consideration all of the varied aspects of urban poverty, and doesn’t merely address it as an impersonal income-line. An action-project constructed of the proper perspectives and resources to confront and resolve social and economic issues that have been allowed to fester and intensify for far too many years can literally redirect the behavior of succeeding generations, and produce a self-reinforcing impact that will become the norm. Altering negative behavior patterns entails the introduction of conscious choices, where these choices are murky or non-apparent the prevailing patterns will continue unabated.

Citations

Desmond, M. ( 2012 ) Eviction and Reproduction of Urban Poverty. American Journal of Sociology. AJS Volume 118, 88-133.

Haugen, G., & Boutros, V. ( 2014 ) The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires Violence. Oxford University Press.

Hilfiker, D. ( 2003 ) Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen, 1st edition. Seven Stories Press.

Howard, E. ( 2013 ) Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America ( Politics and Culture in Modern America ) University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kemp-Graham, K. Y. ( 2013 ) The Elephant in the Room: Poverty Capacity and Urban School Reform. Scholars’ Press.

Ludwig, J., Duncan, G. J., & Hirschfield, P. ( 2001 ) Urban Poverty and Juvenile Crime: Evidence from a Randomized Housing-mobility Experiment. Oxford Journals, Economics, and Social Sciences Quarterly. Volume 116, issue 2 pp. 655-679.

Mitlin, D. ( 2004 ) Understanding Urban Poverty: What Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers Tell Us. International Institute for Environment and Development. No 13, IIED London.

Wilson, W. J. ( 1997 ) When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, 1st edition Vintage. New York.