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
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.
Not many PhD scholars or professors are able to get in a black crime neighborhood which is poor, stay for seven years and fail to answer this question: “how does it feel when a person is black and poor in addition?”Most of the studies done in this book were done in safe, sanitized ivory towers. This piece of writing portrays neoliberal capitalism on the lives of working class people among the blacks (Venkatesh, 2009). The community views government leaders such as social service workers, Chicago Housing Authority, government agencies and the police differently. Most of these government officials are perceived negatively.
The central ideas in pages 42-46 are trying to find out if Malcolm sees the difference in the ‘’ghetto’’ and the ‘’Hills’’. The idea of this is to see if Malcolm can see the difference between rich and poor. ‘’They tied themselves down working somewhere, because they would never again have the time to really see and get to know anything about the city they were living in’’(42). Malcolm couldn’t get over the men in the pool rooms. ‘’The sharp-dressed young ‘’cats’’ who obviously didn’t work anywhere, completely entranced me’’(45).
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.
Matthew Desmond’s book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, reveals the dire reality of renting leading to evictions and poverty by telling the stories of multiple people. There are multiple issues within this topic that Desmond focuses on such as discrimination. Desmond tells the stories of people from different backgrounds, of different genders, and of different races. The book is all about poverty, human nature, human relationships, and human hopes. Due to the nature of this book, it is crucial that the events are examined through a socio-cultural lens.
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.
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
