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QOL problems of the welfare population are created by that population (ie, not by the architecture of the projects, because market-rate neighbors live perfectly normally and without any QOL problems in the same architecture, in the same city locations).
If somebody is raised by a single parent on welfare and many of the people where they live are
how would they know there is something wrong with it?
If somebody is raised by a single parent on welfare and many of the people where they live are
how would they know there is something wrong with it?
They would know there is something wrong with it from:
(1) paying even minimal attention to what the schoolteachers are saying
(2) walking one block to the north, around the Stuy Town area, or walking in most areas of Manhattan
(3) logging onto the Internet, and checking out pretty much anything other than hiphop videos
(4) watching any informative programs, or more than half of the movies, on TV - even if they can view only the public TV channel, no cable
(5) going to the public library and taking a look at papers/magazines, or borrowing books or other materials from there
(6) going pretty much anywhere in the city that is not their hood - just going to Central Park on a weekend and watching kids & parents from various backgrounds, going to any kind of store just to take a look without buying anything, going to Starbucks where people often work on something that includes reading and writing, seeing people doing their jobs (mail carriers delivering mail, construction workers building something, a nurse giving them a shot at the clinic, millions of people doing millions of jobs), all sorts of other examples of places where one can observe without any special effort how 8+ million New Yorkers live and behave.
Information about society and everything else has always been accessible, particularly in such a world center of information as NYC. Additionally, in the last 25 years, information about anything and everything has been at everyone's fingertips via Internet, with free access in libraries, schools, at work. It's not like NYC projects are on the moon or in a remote area of the Amazon jungle.
A better question is how can somebody present a laughably absurd argument that kids in projects cannot have knowledge of anything else in the world except of single mothers on welfare and of gangsta rap :-).
Name a housing project one block south of or close to Stuy Town
Okay, I had to look up that one since I wouldn't know names of public housing projects - however, I do know that the entire eastern side of lower Manhattan (below E14th St) is encircled with public housing projects, ie, brown brick towers of the housing projects which blend with the same brown brick tower architecture of Stuy Town/Peter Cooper Village that starts on E14th St. The only difference is the window paint - the projects have window frames painted white, and Stuy Town/Peter Cooper green.
Stuy Town/Peter Cooper Village is on the East Side from E23rd St to E 14th St (going from north to south)
According to Wikipedia, the next brown brick tower complex complex is called The Jacob Riis Houses (a NYCHA project), on the East Side from E13th St to E6th St (again going from north to south).
How many blocks, from north to south, are there between E14th St and E13th St? I would say about one block :-).
Even if the distance between projects and market-rate housing were more than just one street block, it is insane to say that kids from the projects do not have any exposure to NYC outside the projects. Sorry, but that degree of stretching a fake argument is really bizarre.
So somebody lives there and they walk over and see Stu Town
Then what?
The Jacob Riis Houses are on E13th St/Avenue D, and Stuy Town on E14th St/Avenue C. That is one block, particularly because Avenue D ends at E13th St, and the easternmost avenue before FDR Drive on the next block (ie, on E14th St) is Avenue C.
Project kids walk one block north from The Jacob Rius Houses where they live. They see professional people living in the same housing as their own project housing - but the professional people are going somewhere with a defined purpose (ie, to work, or if they are kids to school), not loitering in groups and smoking pot, not injecting anything in a vein, not asking for a quarter, not making drug deals, not screaming stupidly at each other, not urinating in public, not swaggering around in $400 red sneakers and red bandanas making a statement about belonging to a criminal gang, not blaring loud music at the neighbors, not throwing garbage everywhere, certainly not doing anything that would involve violence. Mothers that they can see in Stuy Town/Peter Cooper are not 16 years old, and are not carting around a herd of kids, but probably only one or two. Incredibly, kids in Stuy Town have a mother AND a father!
You asked "if somebody is raised by a single parent on welfare and many of the people where they live are, how would they know there is something wrong with it?". If they see all of the above one block to the north in Stuy Town, and compare it with their own living situation, they will realize there IS something wrong with being raised by a single parent on welfare. Particularly if they combine that observation with all the other resources I mentioned, which will inevitably tell them that there IS something wrong with being raised on welfare.
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