The Necessity for Comprehensive Job Matching Programs in Inner City Communities
Julia Wood
University of California at Los Angeles
Introduction Job programs implemented to help eradicate urban poverty and stimulate job growth for the nation’s most disadvantaged populations are either myopic and limited in scope, or require extensive governmental oversight, community involvement, and federal funding to prove effective. When exhausting the pros and cons of various policies and their alternatives, legislators and public officials must carefully consider the short-term versus long-term consequences of practical policies at their disposal. Limited job initiatives that concentrate and expend majority of their resources on development through tax incentives, housing dispersal strategies, or job training programs to increase employment are not comprehensive enough to address the multifaceted needs of the urban poor.
To get a job, keep a job, and experience long-term upward mobility, these underserved populations need to be enrolled in comprehensive job matching programs that connect them to
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It is also due to the post World War II white-flight to the suburbs catalyzed by expanding residential and road development (Wilson 1996). The rapid decline in low-skilled jobs and the maintenance of the black urban ghetto through institutional arrangements and residential segregation has concentrated poverty and unemployment, creating extremely harsh environments where social deterioration is adaptive (Massey & Denton, 1993). Welfare dependency, violence, poverty, children born out of wedlock, lack of community involvement and oversight, poor public services, and educational failure are the realities that affect these disadvantaged communities, rendering upward socioeconomic mobility nearly