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You have to move. Drugs are illegal and hence unregulated. Business that is unregulated and ungoverned can't and won't get done without violence...it's impossible.
And god forbid you call the cops and they find out.
Not to mention that it's wise to sell your property while it still holds some value.
Columbus is finacially mixed. Maybe not rich living right across from poor, but middle class and lower class mixed on one street and rich right around the corner. It seems to make the city as a whole look alot better and more stable. I don't know how it effects the property value though, I would imagine it would slightly lower the value for the rich and slightly raise the value for the other two classes.
Very interesting. I'm just trying to get info on Pittsburgh and diversity is important to me. As for Columbus, you are right, it is pretty financially mixed but that was changing when I was there. All the new houses are going up in the ever expanding suburbs, and so are the prices because that's where all the "rich" people are moving to. Columbus has pockets of lower income black neighborhoods. I guess the east side would be the general area of concentration.
You have to move. Drugs are illegal and hence unregulated. Business that is unregulated and ungoverned can't and won't get done without violence...it's impossible.
And god forbid you call the cops and the dealers find out...or even worse, the cops (like you say) are corrupt.
Ever wonder why the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons of the world never show up in these neighborhoods to fight the injustices that these drug dealers cause? I guess their voices are only to be heard when there is some sort of black-on-white or white-on-black crime.
I don't think I will ever understand why they don't invest their political capital in the places where it's REALLY needed, instead of defending violent predatory criminals like the "Jena 6". Wouldn't it be nice if they actually used preventative measures to control the roots of the problems?
Yes, we are moving within the month. Things are not so bad here that we won't get our money out of our house, but it is sad nonetheless. Parts of the borough have really come up while we were here and are quite nice, but now it seems they've ceded more territory that they used to patrol more heavily. It's impossible to know what is going on here -- ther borough is totally closed-mouth. You can't get police stats or any other info. Years ago I found a man dead in a car outside the neighbor's house. He was elderly and it certainly looked like he'd just had a heart attack or stroke, but I could never get any information about it after the fact. Same with the burglaries we recently had. All you get is "we can't discuss an ongoing investigation."
I don't agree at all that unregulated business is destined to breed violence -- when I buy a gallon of milk fresh from a local farmer in contravention of the health department or when I pay a guy to mow my lawn under the table, there's no threat of it escalating to any kind of violence. But these minor crimes don't carry the same risk of prosecution or involve the same amounts of money, so the stakes are much lower. Personally, I'm a proponent of legalization for that reason. Making drugs illegal does nothing to stem the demand for them, it only increases the social costs of providing them, IMO.
Pisc,
That is exactly the same point Juan Williams makes in his book "Enough!"...He says basically these guys are only in the "leadership" role for self-serving motives..Jesse wanted to be the next Martin and Al wanted to be the next Jesse..both being cheap
imitations of the actual civil rights pioneers who changed society..
They never made dramatic grassroots social change like the original leaders and perpurtrate "victimhood" issues and defend dysfunctional behaviour in a knee-jerk reaction...as in: The criminal is a victim because he got an unjust harsher sentence
as opposed to going into the neighborhood and saying "Don't do the crime in the first
place,you will ruin your life"
The guy who wrote this book is a black liberal but has been banned by the traditional liberal establishment..they say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged...
I think Pittsburgh is segregated racially do to the class issues as was stated before,a small black middle class..where the racism comes in is that dysfunctional behaviour is
is seen as due to race..not class...like when the white guy in New York went to a well
known resturant in Harlem and commented on how civilized it was and no one was screaming curse words across the room and rap music was not playing...so his association in his mind was: black=loud,agressive ignorant,cursing and rap music..
I think class differences among American-Africans are lost among most white americans if
they are just going by here say and the media and the buffoons on the street..if they don't know anyone personally especially...the negative behaviour in some black people
adds fuel to racism that might already be in the mind of the observer...
I totally agree, even though most of my family is middle class and black. It does seem like if you are black you are more likely rich or poor (more likely poor sadly) than middle class. I notice more and more the city and county are trying to intermingle the classes by putting low income housing in higher income communities such as Monroeville, West Mifflin, South Park, Cranberry and etc. but they never seem to work out. I assume that it is because just enough of the wrong people get in and ruin it for everyone. As for your question I am not sure maybe discrimination does have somthing to do with it. I see your location says chicago, how are these issues there?
One thing you'll learn about me is that you can expect big long windbag answers when you ask me about sociological issues. So here goes:
I already did a pretty extensive comparison of race relations between Pittsburgh and Chicago (and NYC to the extent that I believed them to be similar in nature) in this other long windbag post in a different thread. It too is pretty lengthy, so if you don't want to read the whole thing the summary version of it is this:
The premise of race relations in Chicago is different than Pittsburgh because (not counting Hispanics) there are more black people than white people in Chicago;
Because of this, Chicago cannot function without the input of the black community. Unlike Pittsburgh, Chicago has black power brokers (Jesse Jackson chief among them, Barak Obama becoming more prominent every day) who have enough influence to make or break political fortunes, and if the issue is critical enough, they can just about bring this city to a halt;
Therefore, race relations here are much more contentious here than in Pittsburgh but also more productive. They are more contentious not because they are worse, but because the black community has enough strength in numbers to actually put up a decent fight. Blacks here have enough of a voice that their concerns get a hearing and sometimes bits of their agenda are implemented. Many will contend that their voice isn't heard as loudly as it should be and their political influence is too weak as a proportion of their population, but the concessions they do secure are enough to maintain an uneasy but stable truce.
It is my conjecture that, because of this political input, a higher proportion of blacks in Chicago feel that they have a stake in the city and its success/fortunes compared to blacks in Pittsburgh. Feeling like you have no stake can be a huge psychological barrier to upward mobility. I sense a lot more futility in the black community of Pittsburgh than Chicago, and I think this shows in the lack of black middle-class in Pittsburgh.
That said, I don't think one can overstate the impact of each city's economic fortunes on their respective black communities. Chicago's economy has long been extremely diversified and therefore it was not hit nearly as hard as Pittsburgh by the industrial decline. It was a blip on our radar screen and we moved right on. "A rising tide raises all boats" goes the old metaphor. To adapt the metaphor to Pittsburgh's situation, "nobody gets anywhere on a ship that's adrift." That's especially true for a deeply rooted underclass. Plus, Pittsburgh got the short end of the self-selection that took place in the 80s: those with more ambition and initiative got out and sought work elsewhere when the mills closed; those with less ambition and initiative (or those whose economic status was already secure) stayed. The Pittsburgh diaspora is a well-known phenomenon -- we even have Pittsburgh Steeler-themed bars here in Chicago. The Black Pittsburgh diaspora is not as well-known, but it does exist. (They mostly seem to be in Atlanta and Charlotte.) This becomes evident when you read the e-mails on Elwyn Green's "My Homewood" column on the Post-Gazette website.
I don't want to give the impression that everything is nice and rosy for the black community in Chicago. It's not. Poverty is still deeply ingrained and intergenerational in much of the black community, and the street gangs here are ferocious. (An aggravating factor is that the black street gangs not only have to contend with each other, but with Mexican street gangs too, and they well and truly hate each other.) And in many ways, segregation is even worse in Chicago than Pittsburgh. In Pittsburgh, the poor black neighborhoods are relatively small pockets with "normal" neighborhoods around them. No matter which Pittsburgh ghetto you live in, unless you're dead-centered in the Homewood/Brusthon/Lincoln/Larimer part, you're never too far from functional society, and you always have that reference point/comparison nearby. Now, imagine if the entire city of Pittsburgh were like Homewood. Do that and you have the south side of Chicago. Here, the ghetto goes on for miles and miles. Many ghetto residents, especially the kids, rarely see anything else but more ghetto. They literally don't know anything else. Take a look at this ethnic distribution map of Chicago, where green is white, orange is hispanic, gray is black, and lighter versions of each color represents areas of mixed ethnicity, colored according to whichever is the predominant ethncity:
See that big gray blob that starts just south of downtown and extends all the way off the bottom of the map? That area, from top to bottom, is fifteen miles long. And a whole lot of it is straight-up 'hood. So yeah, I think blacks in Chicago have a lot more opportunities for and motivation toward upward mobility than blacks in Pittsburgh. But we're still a long, long way from having it all figured out.
There's a site: citizenobserver.com. Put in your zip code, you should be able to register and get alerts. In Zone 5, E Liberty & Highland Park, surprisingly, there are no alerts at this time (bs, that).
I'm sorry, but lack of education and having babies that you don't have the wherewithal to care for are the biggest problems we face. Can't feed them, can't care for yourself, why bring kids into poverty and this world? Don't want an education, expect to be selling drugs or hooking until you go to jail or die.
Pisc,
That is exactly the same point Juan Williams makes in his book "Enough!"...He says basically these guys are only in the "leadership" role for self-serving motives..Jesse wanted to be the next Martin and Al wanted to be the next Jesse..both being cheap
imitations of the actual civil rights pioneers who changed society..
They never made dramatic grassroots social change like the original leaders and perpurtrate "victimhood" issues and defend dysfunctional behaviour in a knee-jerk reaction...as in: The criminal is a victim because he got an unjust harsher sentence
as opposed to going into the neighborhood and saying "Don't do the crime in the first
place,you will ruin your life"
The guy who wrote this book is a black liberal but has been banned by the traditional liberal establishment..they say a conservative is a liberal who got mugged...
I think Pittsburgh is segregated racially do to the class issues as was stated before,a small black middle class..where the racism comes in is that dysfunctional behaviour is
is seen as due to race..not class...like when the white guy in New York went to a well
known resturant in Harlem and commented on how civilized it was and no one was screaming curse words across the room and rap music was not playing...so his association in his mind was: black=loud,agressive ignorant,cursing and rap music..
I think class differences among American-Africans are lost among most white americans if
they are just going by here say and the media and the buffoons on the street..if they don't know anyone personally especially...the negative behaviour in some black people
adds fuel to racism that might already be in the mind of the observer...
Very well said! I will have to get Juan's new book. I used to listen to him on NPR all the time. You touch on some very interesting points regarding "racism" actually being "class-ism". The simple fact of the matter is that those who have the money do everything they possibly can to not only keep it all, but to make MORE of it. They couldn't care less if we're white, black or purple as long they are rich and we are poor. :-(
The middle/working class are no better off than we were feudal serfs. Slavery is alive and thriving in the world, and it always will be. The slave owners have just changed their M.O. That may sound drastic, but, is it not true? Think for a second about what life is like for the average working man/woman in this country. They work hard all week long and they still can't provide insurance to themselves and family. They make barely enough to feed themselves let alone enjoy themselves.
Yet America claims to be a "God Fearing Christian" Nation. Yea, sure.
I don't agree at all that unregulated business is destined to breed violence.
This is a valid point.
I wonder why other unregulated businesses seem to breed less violence. You never see pimps go to war over turf....maybe the drug trade has higher profit margins...or maybe it's the type of person involved????
Chicago sounds like Philly,...but in Philly the black community has evolved to dominate the local political power structure. This makes for some "interesting" dynamics.
The most obvious difference to an outside observer would be the local media. In Philly they celebrate Hanu-Christma-Kwanzaka. Or in Philly you will see less of the "report every murder in the 'hood' while showing mug-shots or that hand-cuffed perp-walk".
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