I’m extremely lucky, I was raised in projects at an early age in an absolutely horrible area and went through middle school and high school there (mother eventually moved out of the projects but in the same city). Random beatings were common once you neared your teen years, I was physically attacked many times just because I was white I guess (judging by the racial words said towards me).
But yeah, most people do not do well in life there, they are stuck in a cycle of violence, drugs, and other destructive behavior that they never recover from. It makes absolutely no sense how I was able to make it out and end up doing very well in life.
I want to help others break free from the cycle of self destruction but it’s very hard unless you are with them daily.
Anyways, to this day I’m thankful for John Carmack for giving me that spark of interest in computers.
Ah man, you are just like me, except I'm the opposite skin color. Violence in ghettos knows no bounds, I can't recall how many times as a kid I've had to look the other way or keep my mouth shut so as to not get killed. At a certain point you realize the only way to succeed in life is to leave.
I also was inspired by developers like John Carmack and Chris Sawyer, and fortunately my dad had a Compaq Presario in those days, so I took a love for programming early. I can remember having to haul a bookbag full of programming books from the local library, through the ghetto to our apartment, nervous day that was.
I don't people really understand how much different it is living in the ghetto vs living in a middle-class area. It is night and day, and anyone can attest that once you make it out you never want to return if you can help it, and most fail to appreciate the incredible difficulty of "fixing" an area like that or even helping someone who refuses to leave
I went through similar things. I do alright now but my brother stayed on the same line and things aren't so good there.
If there is one difference I can point at, it was my friends and girlfriends (and now wife) that are the causative factor in my direction. They pushed me to be more than the sum of my past and circumstances. My brother's friends just held him in place. I was lucky.
Same with me! My relationships pushed me to go higher, put myself in a better place, while my brother had friends who kept him down, some months back I heard a family member had to stay in jail over a weekend for doing something his friends told him were okay.
It's absolutely, crushingly, depressing seeing how far you've come up, vs how others are staying down and the incredibly thin line of circumstance that seperates you both.
> It's absolutely, crushingly, depressing seeing how far you've come up, vs how others are staying down and the incredibly thin line of circumstance that seperates you both.
I hear you! this hits home hard with me. It is truly sad to see your family "stuck" in the same circumstances but at the same time I also think is very motivating to know that you "broke" the cycle from your family's "unlucky" past circumstances.
My family was poor but thankfully we lived more rural than anything, which is a little different than city-poor. My biggest problem growing up was the psychological abuse my mom would dish out to pretty much anyone who looked at her. When I was young I thought it was cool, in a rebellious way. It took me a while to realize she was actually the black sheep of the family. She had worked herself a serious alcohol addiction, diabetes, lung disease, and burned just about every bridge she's made. Seeing her in a helpless state and realizing that I wasn't really headed for anything better, I glued my eyes to my first CS textbook until the ideas made sense.
To both of you: seems like you were still born in the US or some western nation. I would take beatings and ghetto over war any day.
The American ghettos / projects are a solvable issue. It baffles me how such a relatively easy problem (compared to middle eastern wars) is so hard to fix for the richest economy on earth. Can you tell me why it is difficult to fix the projects and ghettos?
It is like a nicotine addiction. I am sure from the outside looking in you think it is easy for someone to quit smoking, but they have built their lifestyle around it and it's convenience and comfort it provides to them, it is very hard for them to let go. It is the same with a ghetto, many people living in them want those places to stay the same. They have built up a life around the society norms and don't want it to change. It is hard to fix something when it desires to stay broken.
Meanwhile, a war just needs to end. The structure can always be rebuilt. The culture may not be the same as it was when it started, but it won't be in disarray forever, and the people in a warzone usually want the war to end.
Blaming the people in the ghetto for the problems of the ghetto is a common refrain of those who seek to deny the material conditions and motivations that created the ghetto in the first place. This train of thought leads to the justification of various cutbacks and reductions in social aid programs (exacerbating the situation), as the presumed beneficiaries of such programs are deemed lazy, morally unworthy, and lacking the desire to change their ways.
Changing this perception is key to making progress on this and related issues of class and resource distribution. There's heaps of research out on the positive difference a slight increase in resources can make in terms of human development.
What? I literally grew up in the ghetto, I can say from firsthand experience there is no lack of opportunity preventing anyone from moving up out of the ghetto. The only thing holding me back were others who wanted to stay in the ghetto.
I never said anything about laziness or unworthiness, don't lump my experience or comments with some other group you have imagined.
And lastly, I will not change my perception on anything. I have first-hand experience of having my life threatened because I was on the wrong side of the street at the wrong time, or I declined to do something for someone who couldn't take no for an answer, or I simply walked a certain way. These experiences won't be diluted so that you can co-opt them to influence others on your ideology.
I wasn't assuming you did say anything about those things; I was merely saying that others commonly do so, and do in fact frequently lump those together with "they have opportunities, but don't want to take them" in a way that harms the communities like the one you grew up in, while being quite ignorant of the policy, available resources, and conditions in general.
I am honestly glad you made it out, by the way. I'm not so presumptuous to think that a comment here would "change your perception" or "co-opt" anyone to serve my "ideology."
Not sure why you'd think your personal experience is representative of the average experience -- decades of social science research suggest the contrary.
What does the social science research say in precise terms?
Are you sure it doesn't just say that external factors created or create pressures against taking extant opportunities, rather than those opportunities don't exist in the first place?
The last two points you made really struck me simply because I really think they nail these problems on the head quite succinctly. Wars are terrible, destructive and complicated, but they tend to end pretty quickly (few exceptions aside) because the people involved in their absolute majority don't want the disruption war brings to an otherwise comfortable (if imperfect) normal state of existence. The project "warzones" of large urban areas are themselves the comfortable state of existence for millions of their inhabitants. And thus no matter their their nastiness and miseries, just as you mentioned, attempts at positive external change are in a way analogous to war actually, because like war, they're the external and mostly imposed disruptions despite their good intentions. No amount of money and resources being thrown at urban blight will easily change things without bearing this in mind. This is not to say that resources for improving ghetto life should be cut off, but how they're attempted needs to seriously be reconsidered.
> Can you tell me why it is difficult to fix the projects and ghettos?
Because “the projects and ghettos” aren't a statement of a problem, and to the extent that there is an agreement that there are problems around those things, there is not consensus on what the problem is, much less the solution, and the lack of consensus is not only about empirical fact, but includes a fundamental clash of ideological principles.
This is correct. Everyone pretty much agrees that these areas are a symptom of a problem. Nobody agrees on what that problem even is.
Further, various factions (there are more than two) seem to believe that the problem is exacerbated by what other factions believe to be a proto-mitigation. E.g. see discussion of rent control -- some people believe that rent control keeps people out of public housing, others believe that rent control forces people into public housing, still others believe that rent control has nothing to do with it.
Your comment is ignorant. The issue is not easy to fix. This sounds like me saying, well get rid of religion in the Middle East it will fix the wars, but that is ignorant.
Projects/ghettos are not simple to solve. It is a pretty complex problem.
Well, that’s just the thing - the ghettos _are_ the solution. The problem was lack of affordable housing, so the government mandated affordable housing. The result was ghettos, since everybody who had nowhere else to go ended up there.
I remember a discussion with someone who lived in a French equivalent (perhaps not as bad), at the time those were being constructed (from the 50' to the 70'). At the time, people who started living there were happy, because the alternative were shantytown/slums. Of course it didn't last, but I found it interesting to see this viewpoint.
They probably worked well for 10 years. The ghettos in France are pretty bad right now too. Maybe what was missing was reinvestment in these areas, the development of services and building out the community. London and the UK have experimented with transitioning council flats to owner occupied for example. Gentrification maybe too?
From what I've heard, such areas have received and continue to receive public money, but it doesn't look like it's working. Or I am wrong and such money don't exist/go elsewhere (grafts, corruption, public money waste or just area that aren't too bad). Or the places where it's working aren't those we're hearing about (the squeaky wheel get the grease and all that).
There's a lot of racial animus that compounds that - inner-city ghettos generally tend to be non-white thanks to red-lining and white-flight in the past, and the present disdain for "welfare queens" in the political zeitgeist, since Reagan.
Is that a difficult solution? Western countries could end world hunger[1] for something between what we spend on alternative medicine[2] and what we spend on food that we throw away[3]. Of course, there are some difficulties like lack of infrastructure needed to get aid to everyone who needs it, but those seem hardly insurmountable. Companies seem to be able to reach the most remote regions of the world when it comes to things like producing coffee; I don't see why it should be impossible to feed everyone.
The main difficulty, as far as I can tell, is that most people are reluctant to pay to feed even the people that they share the streets with, let alone people in the third world. But I don't think you can really call a problem "difficult" if the only reason you haven't done it is because you choose not to.
> Ah man, you are just like me, except I'm the opposite skin color.
That sentence is one of the coolest and most hopeful things I've read in a while. When people can see the "other" as "just like me", despite the obvious difference, then maybe we can break down some of the walls that divide us.
I didn't grow up in the projects but I was projects adjacent, where I caught the school bus with the project kids and hung out in their homes. In fact my best friend whom I still talk to regularly now that we're both in our early 30s grew up in multiple projects throughout his childhood.
The thing that really helped the both of us out were magnet schools. By taking us out of our neighborhoods and giving us friends and relationships from more walks of life, I think it helped us see that the world was larger than the blocks we grew up on and we adjusted for living in a world that didn't begin and end with things that were in our immediate surroundings.
Recently I've watched 'The Wire' for the first time and the season focused on education really hit hard. Having gone to 'inner city' schools where I wore uniforms and felt pressure to pursue... let's call them 'non-academic' goals, I really related to the outlook of the adults in that school. Particularly when the kid's mom was scolding him for not having the initiative to start selling drugs (this was my friend's mom in spades) and the retired police officer who explained to that kid's dad that he didn't have to live in the same world they grew up in. I got a similar speech from a vice principal who grew up in my neighborhood.
I attended a computer science magnet jr/high school in Omaha Public Schools. 68111.
McMillan and Omaha North were my first introductions to computer programming. I fell in love. Met so many people of different backgrounds. And I don't know where I'd be today without those initial classes.
Awesome you were able to get yourself out of that situation and are having a prosperous life. Though there are real problems of poverty and violence in the US, I've always thought it was great how in a generation a family can raise themselves out of these situations. My father was raised in a coal mining camp. Talk about dirt poor - one pair of shoes with holes, one pair of pants to wear everyday, no running water, 1 or 12 kids, etc, etc. After high school my father traveled to Oregon (from West Virginia) and joined the Coast Guard. He made a career of the Coast Guard eventually retiring in So Cal where he purchased a house (early 70s) for $30K which is now worth $800K. I grew up there in a comfortable suburban neighborhood, went to good schools, and was able to to go to college and have a good life.
How many are rising out of that sort of situation in the U.S. in 2019? It's in the interest of those who seek to maintain the status quo to have people believe that this is a real possibility, when for most, it isn't.
It doesn’t have to be urban or dangerous. Most of the time it is but not always. My father grew up poor in a rural area and was in the projects in his county.
I'm in NYC and this is what we refer to as the projects here: https://i.imgur.com/UyTKWJg.jpg It's mostly people living on welfare but there's all sorts of people living in these. People that are disabled, poor, people with money but want to be cheap and save money. The buildings and the elevators can sometimes smell like piss. On garbage days, the streets and the walkways in between are covered in litter.
There is overlap, in project-based Section 8, which is based on government contracts with private landlords for specific housing projects, as opposed to the better known form of Section 8 which follows the individual rather than being locked to a particular housing project.
My understanding is that these are logistically different things. Public housing projects are state owned, whereas Section 8 refers to privately owned housing where rent is paid at least partly by government vouchers.
It's one of those technically different, but functionally the same things.
"Projects" and "Section 8" are two separate government programs, but they both wind up with similar demographics because it only attempts to solve one issue.
And in the case of Section 8, assumes best faith action of a third party. Which is hardly the case. Often, an apartment complex gets built as "Section 8" housing. And since the government is footing the bill, not the tenant, it's built to the least possible standard and service is usually poor. Because the incentive for the landlord is to spend as little as possible on it.
They are almost equivalent in everyday use, but in actual meaning, they are different.
"The projects" strictly refers to the building developments themselves, but is often used informally to refer to a poor neighborhood in general.
"The Ghetto" refers to a neighborhood of an urban area and not a particular building or group of buildings. "The projects" are often in the ghetto but not necessarily.
Saying "I grew up in the ghetto" and "I grew up in the projects" are more-or-less equivalent. Both only refer to urban areas; there is no such thing as a rural ghetto.
Ghetto technically refers to a neighborhood into which a racial minority tends to be segregated. It comes from Jewish ghettos enforced legally in Europe in the 16th century, but it is also used for neighborhoods where minorities live for other reasons (such as social or economic pressure).
Project refers either to public housing, or more generally any group of buildings where economically disadvantaged people tend to be segregated.
Because these very frequently overlap in the US, people often use them interchangeably.
And for reference, public housing in the US doesn't have a very good reputation. It's not just the poverty of the residents, it's the management, too. A survey of headlines about the NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) will find problems with lead paint that the agency tried to cover up, issues with toxic mold, falsified maintenance records, energy-efficiency projects which change out the light bulbs in the apartment for LEDs at a cost of $2000 a bulb, and workers who just sleep on the job — which is in fact a step up from the workers who made headlines about having orgies on the job (no, seriously.)
It comes down to the tenants not being the customer. The customer is the government. And as long as they're paying, you do the least possible to maintain that.
If the government standard says you need to do maintenance on HVAC once every 6 months. You do maintenance once every 6 months, regardless of whether or not it needs it more often.
You don't have to work in the field to help. In fact, might be effective to go through established channels.
I recommend giving money to proven nonprofits (do your research and read disclosure documents before you do) that help at-risk youths from the projects develop job skills and stay out of jail.
I support and train at a gym that employs at-risk youth and reformed criminals and trains them to become personal trainers with the appropriate certs. It's run by a guy who used to work with these kids in the hood and has devoted his life to this cause. Graduates of his training program enjoy significantly lower rates of recidivism. I feel great about being able to help out as a person with a good salary in tech (and the young trainees/formerly imprisoned youths I've met through the program are absolutely phenomenal people).
But yeah, most people do not do well in life there, they are stuck in a cycle of violence, drugs, and other destructive behavior that they never recover from. It makes absolutely no sense how I was able to make it out and end up doing very well in life.
I want to help others break free from the cycle of self destruction but it’s very hard unless you are with them daily.
Anyways, to this day I’m thankful for John Carmack for giving me that spark of interest in computers.