The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.
Central cities are no longer the growth centers of poverty. Will these mean that the inner cities are experiencing rapid gentrification more than ever before?
For his new project, Romer set up a nonprofit organization dedicated to convincing governments across the developing world that they should cede a portion of their territory to an external authority in order to create a “charter city” in which new rules would make it attractive for skilled immigrants, unskilled migrants and businesses to come and settle.This radical idea is slowly catching on. Honduras is poised to be the first country in the world to host a charter city after its Congress approved a constitutional amendment enabling such a plan in January.
[Link to Ending Poverty via Urban Planning]
As per estimates of the Committee set up by Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation under the Chairmanship of Dr. Pranob Sen, Principal Adviser, Planning Commission (former Secretary, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, and Chief Statistician, Government of India) the slum population in the country is expected to touch 93.06 million by 2011.
India too conducts its census every ten years and the sheer size of numbers blows away your mind; Uttar Pradesh, one of the states in northern India now has a population of 200 million – almost two-thirds that of the entire U.S. Although 93.06 million in slums sounds like abject poverty, in reality its not exactly true. Some 'slums' in Mumbai are hotbeds of grassrooots entrepreneurship and although living conditions could be better, not all hope is lost.
[Link to India's Urban Slum Population]
Colonias — impoverished communities along the United States' southern border — date back to the 1950s when ruthless property developers created unincorporated subdivisions on agriculturally useless land that usually lay in floodplains. They failed to put in any infrastructure and then sold the plots to people seeking affordable housing at hugely inflated rates of interest."Miss one payment," says Lionel Lopez who runs the South Texas Colonia Initiative, an advocacy group for residents, "and you have to start all over again."
[Link to Destitution North of the Border - Alex Hannaford - National - The Atlantic]
Point: The idea that descendants of African slaves are the only people in the history of our species to be done in by the configuration of architectural blueprints is mistaken.
It was much, much more complicated than that: the culprit was aspects of social history in America starting in the late sixties, not merely how housing projects were constructed and how far their doors happened to be from the street.
John McWhorter at the New Republic argues against the commonly held perception that crimes and social conditions are worse off in taller public housing than low-rises. I don’t understand the Sonia Sotomayor connection though and it seems forced in order to attract eyeballs.
Research by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that since 1995 federal funding for low-income housing assistance has dropped by over 20 percent, both as a share of GDP and non-military discretionary spending. Meanwhile, the number of low-income renters spending more than half of their income on housing costs has increased by over 33 percent since 2000.
In the current housing crisis, low-income homeowners continue to face the brunt.
Attempts to resolve poverty and to grant economic justice has been the aim of planning ever since Charles Booth’s studies in London have shown it as a bane to the urbanscape. Planners have oscillated between objectives of eliminating poverty from the neighborhood and eliminating poverty from the people; both of which claim to achieve common ends through very different means. The former merely shifts the problem elsewhere and the latter puts the concerns of the people often in lieu of the economic process.
However one common strand has been to throw money at solving poverty, the logic being isn’t poverty defined as the lack of monetary resources so more of money would be good, right? On the contrary such methods have not only failed to make a dent in the larger issue of poverty but have often compounded the problem. Neoclassical economists will believe in letting the people choose what they want by giving them financial means to do so and if they fail to alleviate their problem, central planners will say, see we told you they cannot make the best decisions for themselves but we have to make it for them. Thus goes the struggle in trying to resolve poverty and only more money gets thrown at a problem that isn’t even close to being solved. The poverty issue has once again found its place in the limelight thanks to John Edward’s Two Americas presidential campaign.
However contrary to the popular opinion, poverty is more of a sociological problem than an economic or political one. But approaches to solve it from a social perspective by first trying to understand its underlying causes have often found lacking. I don’t propose to offer a silver bullet solution for poverty alleviation in this article (if I had one, wouldn’t I be running for President?) but rather shed some light on recent attempts especially at MIT and other top universities in trying to understand the problem and work toward finding a solution.