American Inner-City Housing Revolution

The housing situation that faces inhabitants of the inner cities of the United States cannot be understood without a consideration of the social, economic, and cultural history of the country. The North American colonies were founded by European immigrants who conquered, killed, and marginalized the indigenous inhabitants, and eventually herded them into reservations on worthless rural land. Tens of millions of African slaves were imported to labor on the southern cotton, sugar, and tobacco plantations, with at least as many dying in the terribly inhumane conditions of the trans-Atlantic passage as reached our shores.

The North began to industrialize with construction of a cotton mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1793. During the next century, an unprecedented influx of European immigrants flooded America, primarily Irish, German, Italian, and Jewish, most of whom moved into the urban ghettos close to their ethnic brethren. They lived in tenements with poor sanitation, high crime, and chronic unemployment. When they finally began to move into the mainstream of the American middle class, it was due to pooling their resources, national prosperity, and ethnic representation in the seats of political and economic power.

Following American entry into World War II, there was a labor shortage in the factories producing supplies critical to the war effort. Rural Southern blacks, most of whom were not considered fit for military service, were encouraged to emigrate to the N

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as rents rising at twice the rate of median income. Finally, more than five million rooming houses and single-occupancy units have been destroyed or converted to higher-priced apartments for the middle class with the aid of federal and local governmental programs. So it is possible to say without exaggeration that governmental efforts to "revitalize" the inner cities have been devastating in their effects on the poor, and have made the problem far worse. Ferguson and Dickens (1999, vii) put it this way: Housing subsidies were seen as an economic stimulus for the real estate, mortgage, and home-building industries as much as a benefit to the ill-housed. Similarly, community development has received almost as much emphasis as a strategy for rebuilding the tax base of cities as it has received as a means of accommodating the needs of those living in deteriorating communities. How can all this go on year after year, in Democratic as well as Republican administrations? The main culprit is the media. All of the mainstream media in America - those that reach the vast majority of Americans - are owned by wealthy conservatives, who have every interest in maximizing their profits, and zero interest in educating the citizens of this

Category: History - A