As Bauman et. al. argue in their essay “Public Housing, Isolation, and the Urban Underclass”, the federal public projects systematically disrupted the formation community by forbidding extended kin
Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives” is about the squalor that characterizes New York City’s working class immigrant neighborhoods. He describes deplorable conditions of these immigrants by providing specific examples, relaying them through quotation and images alike. Riis comments on the injustices that the residents of the tenements faced on a regular basis. So, with his attention to detail, Riis provided the contemporary reader with unsettling images of the poor and marginalized along with a few examples of the benefits of reform and reorganization in the poorer communities, to the benefit of residents. Another observer, Richard T. Ely, in “Pullman: A Social Study” writes about the community of Pullman, Illinois located in the suburbs of Chicago.
Issues involving drugs, race, education, work and the meaning of home all come into play. This book showed us how eviction strengthens the inequality
Social mobility is within the grasp of each person so long as they earnestly invest themselves. There exists, however, a dissonance between the achievement ideology and reality as discussed in Jay Macleod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It. In his book, Macleod perfors a longitudinal study over a group of young black men, the Brothers, living in the projects of Clarendon Heights and reveals the insidious social factors that
If residents complain about the unfit conditions of the houses, demand repairs, or cause any kind of trouble, they can expect to be ousted quickly, with little warning. Trouble can come in many forms, from loud or rambunctious children to domestic violence, which can lead to the arrival of the police, a major hindrance for landlords. As a result, tenants are forced to live in uninhabitable conditions without complaint, while potentially enduring violence. Desmond concludes in his book that poverty is a lucrative business that is exploited by the ruling class. Individuals in poverty are in the direst of situations in America and are more often than not left with only one or two options, neither of which are actually helpful to them This is exploited by landlords, rent-to-own stores, payday loans, and many
The novel Evicted, for me, gave difficult stats a story and face. As seen during studies, sometimes humanity is lost. However, Matthew Desmond has taken the sensitive topic of eviction and housing instability in Milwaukee, from both sides of tenant and landlord, and delivered a powerful story of what it means to be disadvantaged. In this report, my personal feelings towards the book will be discussed, as well as, the topics of how the housing market is exploitative, the role that evictions play in destabilizing lives and communities, and a few options to help reduce the social problem of evictions. Exploitative Housing Market
Matthew Desmond’s Evicted takes a sociological approach to understanding the low-income housing system by following eight families as they struggle for residential stability. The novel also features two landlords of the families, giving the audience both sides and allowing them to make their own conclusions. Desmond goes to great lengths to make the story accessible to all classes and races, but it seems to especially resonate with people who can relate to the book’s subjects or who are liberals in sound socioeconomic standing. With this novel, Desmond hopes to highlight the fundamental structural and cultural problems in the evictions of poor families, while putting faces to the housing crisis. Through the lens of the social reproduction theory, Desmond argues in Evicted that evictions are not an effect of poverty, but rather, a cause of it.
The writings and pictures in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives offer a vivid portrayal of the poor living conditions of New York's tenement houses and illustrated the necessity for progressive reform in the late 1800s. A vicious cycle held many of the tenants in its grasps through a combination of the landlords' rent prices and a lack of sustainable incomes. To Riis, the landowners looked like “tyrants that sweeten the cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison” (166). In the destitute areas, crime grew rampant, and the poor packed themselves into the tenements. Disease and illness worked adverse to any improvement of living conditions.
Most immigrants went straight to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and rented very small rooms or even just a bed for around fifty cents to a dollar a week. These people were called boarders or lodgers. Usually there were around five large families in a decent size in every tenement house, and there was very little sanitation or extra room. To the rest of America, this wasn’t even a known problem until in 1890; Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives”, featuring pictures of tenement houses and city streets. This book brought to light the real struggle of immigrant life in the early 1900s.
He speaks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled horrible conditions in Mississippi to find work in Chicago. Like many Americans Ross dreamed of owning a home. However, the only way for a black person to buy a home in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy from predatory “contract” sellers who charged unbillable rates with few legal protections for buyers. Clyde said “To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, I took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.” Like many blacks in Chicago at the time he got two jobs just to keep up with the payments of the house, overall being kept away from his
Normally, the more educated the lady, the more probable she is to wed. Yet, a school taught black lady is not any more liable to have a spouse than a poor Caucasian lady with scarcely a secondary school certificate. With regards to shaping a family, black ladies are not profiting from cutting edge training — nor are they passing those advantages onto the cutting edge. His contentions lie in the sexual orientation unevenness inside of the African American group — where two African American females move on from school for each one African American male. In spite of this irregularity, there is still huge social weight on dark ladies to just marry black men — to "support" the race and manufacture solid black families.
In Chapter 12 of Readings for Sociology, Garth Massey included and piece titled “The Code of the Streets,” written by Elijah Anderson. Anderson describes both a subculture and a counterculture found in inner-city neighborhoods in America. Anderson discusses “decent families,” and “street families,” he differentiates the two in in doing so he describes the so called “Code of the Streets.” This code is an exemplifies, norms, deviance, socialization, and the ideas of subcultures and countercultures.
Societal expectations are a part of everyone’s life, male or female. From the day people are born, there are roles they are expected to assume-- wife, homemaker, father, provider, mother and many others. While these aren’t necessarily negative, the stigma of not fulfilling these roles can be unpleasant. While the roles we are supposed to choose aren’t always clearly defined, the judgement that comes from choosing to take certain actions in life, like settling down or becoming a mother is palpable. Throughout The House on Mango Street, Esperanza’s view of the world is largely shaped by the people around her, which are her neighbors, family, and friends.
However, the outcome of Vance’s life was different as he was graduated from Yale Law School, able to get a well-paying job and currently living the American Dream with his wife Usha. The purpose of the author in this memoir was to understand the reader of how social mobility feels and more importantly, what happens to the lives of the white working-class Americans, in particular the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. J.D Vance provides an explanation for the loss of the American dream to poor white Americans living in a toxic culture in this Ohio steel town.
The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, authored by Nels Anderson, offers an account of the behaviors, choices, relationships and living situations of the homeless in 1920’s Chicago. This study, conducted for the Chicago Council of Social Agencies, provides a platform to voice first hand accounts of the adventures and the hardships of the vagrant life. Born to a Swedish immigrant father and housemaid mother, Anderson spent much of his childhood moving around; from The West, to an Indian reservation, to Hobohemia, he moved 10 times over the course of 10 years. Anderson seeks answers to the many questions surrounding homelessness because he grew up in a milieu that only knew the vagrant life. Once he left high school, Anderson joined the
