Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty? It seems that there's a fine line between compassion and enablement when it comes to the deep blue municipalities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc. Sure the rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are areas with similar problems and mixed politics, but they also somehow feel different.
The destitute are merely more visible in "big dense blue cities" but statistically there are more of them in rural red places like Mississippi and Oklahoma.
After all, in OK or MS you need a car, which is a $2000+ asset, just to even access any public space or resource or make yourself visible at all.
There's much more poverty in those places, but it is hidden away. You can see a slight bit of it at gas stations that are walking distance to poor areas, but for the most part, those are the lucky ones, and the unlucky ones are walking distance to nothing.
I would much rather be destitute in a big city where I can access all kinds of formal and informal resources like temp agencies or subways to sleep on, than in a rural area where I am totally dependent on rides to anywhere.
The advantage of the rural poverty accrues solely to the wealthier, who don't have to look at the poor as much as the urban wealthy and middle classes do. And perhaps that is why we are kinder (well, ok, slightly less unkind) to the deeply poor here, because we actually see them regularly rather than having locked them away so securely we can actually trick ourselves into thinking we don't have them here.
It is deeply ironic that you came to the opposite conclusion by accepting superficial appearances. The trick of hiding the poor by means of car culture sure worked on you.
> I would much rather be destitute in a big city where I can access all kinds of formal and informal resources like temp agencies or subways to sleep on, than in a rural area
This is why so many commuters forego cities' public transit in favor of driving.
"Hiding the poor" versus "letting the poor suffer in plain sight" doesn't seem to matter, then. If it was true that oblivious poverty resulted in more action being taken to help those in need, we wouldn't have a homelessness problem in San Francisco. Clearly that is not the case, so I'd much rather live in a place where it is hidden.
> After all, in OK or MS you need a car, which is a $2000+ asset, just to even access any public space or resource or make yourself visible at all.
Nah, you may need a ride every once in a great while, but in most counties you can get by just walking or biking so long as you live in the county seat. Most services are still consolidated within a couple square miles.
The bigger difference is that you can be incredibly poor and still have a house. We didn't have utilities a decent portion of the time growing up because we were so poor, house was in condemn-worthy condition for most of the time we lived there (roof, basement), but my mom's mortgage was, and still is, around $200 a month.
In my personal experience of living in both rural New York and Pennsylvania and NYC for decades, the ratio seems to skew more towards the city. But I can't say as much for the west.
A $2k car is a lot less than higher average taxes and housing costs.
The rural places you lived in probably genuinely didn't have as much extreme poverty. I'm familiar with some of the types of places you probably mean.
I was thinking of the rural South, where maintaining some degree of radical poverty even in the face of all kinds of modern development has been a strange national sport of sorts for hundreds of years. The OP seemed to be pitting southern red state rural vs northern cities based on their list.
$2000 is a lot for plenty of poor people. And it's not even that easy to get a reliable car at that price anymore, you know. I'm glad it's hard for you to imagine that, but having to constantly either deal with the lack of a car (which usually means being unable to get to work, and thus earn money to feed the car...) or struggle to keep a car (worrying about a surprise bill) is a huge, huge pain for the poor.
I’m from the poorest place in the country. Ok, well almost the poorest (right outside the Mississippi delta). You can get a car for less than 2000 and like someone else mentioned, you don’t even need one because you can just ride a bike.
Public transportation? Public transportation to where? Down the road to the grocery store? Someone is about to wait at a bus stop outside the projects to go 500 feet? Just ride a bike or walk.
Can’t get to work? Someone will pick you up and bring you. Overslept? Expect that same person dragging you out of your bed.
You can find shelter for less than $100/month.
Need food? Go out back and get it.
If I ever was destitute, I’d go back to the rural South in a heartbeat and it blows my mind how many people don’t do that very thing.
Bottom line, I’m 99% sure I’ve a better understanding and closer relationship to extreme poverty than you and you have no idea what you’re talking about.
But, I'd also like to point out that much of the southern tier and western NY is a lot like Appalachia economically. We have much higher poverty rates compared to the rest of the state. The town in which I live is double the state average at around 30% poverty.
And despite the fact that we have double the poverty rate of NYC it's nowhere near as apparent.
In the rural areas you have "poor people" who have their own land and may even live off it a bit - which means they have housing and so are not as noticeable as actual homeless.
If you own your hovel outright you can be incredibly far below the poverty line and be "okish" for some value of "ok". Especially if you have a number of people banding together on the same property (very common in rural areas) - some on SSI or SSD, some on welfare, some making some money on odd jobs.
You can't really have that in the city or near it; the land is too valuable.
Somehow those poor in rural areas find places to live other than tents, tarps, and heaps of garbage. That leads to me to believe your facts are wrong or somehow misconstrued.
No. I moved from the Bay Area to a rural area, we have an entire tent city out in the countryside too. It's just way less visible and people are more understanding of it as the average citizen lives pretty close to that level. Lots of people pay a couple hundred dollars a year to park a 40+ year old camper/trailer on someone's land and can only afford to eat meat that they hunted for. People are SUFFERING and our politicians are fighting over if transgenders should be allowed to exist (yes, yes, human beings should be allowed to exist, now, about the crushing poverty leading people to hopelessness and escape into fentanyl in our district mister conservative family values politician, how about read address REAL social issues?).
But for 10 years in downtown Portland, OR, I have lived in rural towns my entire forty-five years. I have also travelled extensively through rural PNW towns with my schooling and work. This does not at all match my experience.
Rural PNW towns not impacted by insane levels of brown/white? Dude, come on. Mexi's (fentanyl pills) are killing so many people right now. Driving so many young girls prostituting themselves. It is horrible.
You lived in rural America and didn't experience families whose only source of meat was what they hunted? Dude, come on. Or families living in ancient trailer homes/campers?
As for the camps, these places aren't really visible or publicized, I bet plenty of locals don't know about our camp town (or choose not to know). It's way out of town and not near any roads.
Yes, there are lots of poor people in rural areas. No, they do not live in tents in giant mountains of garbage with needles littered all around. What you see in Portland is not a product of being poor. It's a product of enabling the worst of society with three free meals a day and no enforcement of drug laws.
There are boatloads of programs to support the urban poor. I donate to many of them. If you need a hand up in Portland, it's there outstretched and straining to reach you. What we have in the streets are not poor people who need help. They are sick, or mentally disabled people. And some are just truly bad people.
Growing up, my own family's primary (at times only) source of protein was fishing and hunting. We somehow struggled through without being degenerates.
I'd like to point out that blue states like NY are making it harder and harder for rural families to support themselves by hunting (legally) through firearm restriction laws that make sense downstate, but no sense upstate.
The rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are not some beautiful, middle class paradises. They're full of towns littered with heroin and meth addicts subsidized by welfare and petty crime. You just don't see it or read about it because it's across thousands of small towns and not concentrated in major cities, where media also tends to live.
These places have a lot of violence, social issues, drug overdoses, etc. They may not have homelessness at the same level because housing is cheaper and in many cases involves a trailer or an old house in disrepair.
I just spent a few days in Birmingham, Alabama. The downtown streets were so clean you could eat off of them.
It is really hard to come back to Seattle and see all of the trash everywhere. In the Seattle airport one of the bathroom stalls looked like someone had used the floor as a trash can. There were orange peels, discarded shoes, and various other trash sitting on the floor next to the toilet.
Social problems exist everywhere, but that's no reason to give up on having pleasant and usable public spaces.
Birmingham has all of its black people locked up with some of the highest incarceration rates in America. They'd just arrest your ass and throw the book at you if you camped in the streets.
Offer people food and shelter. Hopefully they will take it. If they decline because they like the streets better, there has to be some recourse. We can't cede the health and safety of public spaces because we are too afraid of having to ever tell a person "no." It's not compassionate to let people live in dangerous and unregulated encampments.
Prisons are just used for too much. I wonder if there’s a coincidence in incarceration rates increasing as we phased out mental asylums. Asylums had some issues but maybe there’s a middle ground between lobotomy and todays situation of treating so much as criminal.
Because cities tend to go blue and tend to have their problems crammed into a small area, where a single person can observe it. Taking a photo of 10 junkies strung out on a city street corner tells a more compelling story than taking a picture of a rural junkie on their porch, then driving 10 minutes and taking another picture of a rural junkie on their porch, and then driving another 15 minutes...
In my personal experience of living in both rural New York and Pennsylvania and NYC for decades, the ratio seems to skew more towards the city. But I can't say as much for the west.
> Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty?
Because urban areas tend to be blue, and urban areas attract more poverty (costs are higher, easier to get into poverty; but also there are plenty of public services around that make it "easier" to be poor). Poverty is also just much more visible in areas with denser populations.
I assure you that there's plenty of poverty in right-leaning areas in the US. They're just usually not as visible.
Safer for who? I’m sure enough of the disproportionate minority men in prison and jail or who get harassed by police would disagree with safer. Same with transgender people or people not fitting into traditional social norms.
Red areas are poorer and have more crime (and especially more violent crime) than blue areas, almost unconditionally. It's very easy to find stats on this.
Crime has been dropping for decades, and cities are safer than ever. Hell, San Francisco is one of the least violent cities in the country.
I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here. Crime levels are still at historic lows. There's been a large percentage increase in crime, but when actual numbers are at all-time lows, the percentage increase are always going to be high. There's a media onslaught about crime, which is a nation-wide push from Sinclair broadcasting. Sentiment isn't a usable statistic when sentiment is being purposely biased. It also ignores the fact that SF is still considerably safer than most US cities, especially republican controlled ones.
The sad thing is that Sinclair is not pushing this narrative in some of the most crime ridden cities, so the sentiment in those places is actually higher.
Maybe crime is at historic lows because it's not being reported because people there think it's hopeless to report it. Maybe they've lost faith in their system. Maybe crime rates are higher in right leaning areas because it's reported and criminals are prosecuted for their crimes.
All speculation, but worth considering nonetheless?
Speculation isn't generally worth considering. It's hard to hide murders in statistics, and those numbers follow the same general trend.
Crime is actually down, but crime reporting is considerably up. It drives local news viewership, which drives their advertising revenue. People don't watch news for good news. Because of this trend, people also think that crime is at all time highs.
Crime is higher in republican controlled areas because poverty, as a whole, is higher, and assistance programs are slashed. Crime (excluding white collar) is primarily driven by poverty. Republican controlled areas do also police more aggressively, and tend to heavily over police particular groups, but that hasn't lowered their crime rate, and has likely made it worse, by further pushing those groups into poverty.
Sources? Otherwise it’s just speculation, which I’ve heard isn't generally worth considering.
FWIW, I work on a national news media app and advertising CPMs are down considerably year over year thanks to Apple's ATT update, so advertising is not the driver for these business as much as it once was. Many are looking to subscription revenue to fill the void, but even that's not enough to cover the loss.
I know less about the linear (TV) and print distribution side of the business, but my guess is they're also struggling given that their target demo is getting older and older while younger cohorts aren't adopting these legacy distribution channels. https://mobiledevmemo.com/att-is-killing-advertising-perform...
You're correct in that "if it bleeds it leads"; people are fixated by bad news.
I can say anecdotally after living in both NYC and right-leaning rural NY and PA areas where the crime and poverty rates are statistically higher that it's cleaner and these issues aren't as apparent, so something isn't adding up.
Other comments mention that it's more visible in cities, but I'd like to add that "abject inequity and poverty" are national problems that cities cannot solve individually. Rural areas are given disproportionate political power in our national elections while cities go underrepresented. So national problems that affect cities go ignored.
If rural areas are given disproportionate political power, why can't political parties that feel this disadvantage do better in those areas? Why change the rules of the game instead of winning it?
If a political system disadvantages a group of people then their needs will always take less precedence.
“Why doesn’t the urban coalition simply win rural votes?” is a silly question. They would win rural votes by prioritizing different issues and then the issues important to urban citizens would be less likely to get addressed.
It's not a silly question. If they can't win on their merits then they deserve to loose. That's what democracy is.
Also, notice how I said political parties and not an urban coalition: these are not the same, and their needs are different. There are rural democratic voices, and they do engage in these issues, but the wider party does not seem as interested in this. And that's why they will continue to loose rural voters in the house this November. They don't care as much to spend the time and resources on these campaigns, and this whole fight against the electoral college and how seats are dived up among states is a ruse to further consolidate power while abdicating accountability on a national level.
Also, when democrats spend money on an extreme opponent campaign (which is diabolical) to make their own party look better, people see through that. It's just sick and could severely backfire on everyone. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/dem...
I agree that Democrats should focus on rural areas more. You have to win by the rules not complain about the game.
But you’re missing my point by ignoring coalitions to focus on parties.
Imagine a religion that is a mix of democrats and republicans. Imagine Saturday is a holy day for them where they try not to engage with the modern world as much.
If elections were only held on Saturday this would hurt their community.
This is why farm subsidies are plentiful for example, neither party wants to claw those back and face the consequences.
It’s also why social security is “the third rail of American politics”. Republican or democrat, no senior wants their checks messed with. And having elections on a Tuesday in November is a fine time for seniors and retirees to vote even if it sucks for other people.
Because the two-party system limits choice to voters and polarizes camps.
A democrat could have genuinely good policy that would make an enormous difference for a lot of republican voters. But stances on social issues like gay marriage, gun control, etc, will make them unviable as a candidate. If they switch and support these issues, then they'll lose their primary.
While I don't think Yang has a shot, I really appreciate his attempt to find a new, level-headed middle. Finding middle ground is our best hope. I think there are ideas from both sides that could help both city and rural constituents, and believe that the culture war has gotten out of control on both sides with irreconcilable differences that disqualify the other. However, I also believe that rural voters could be won by Dems if they were engaged on their level instead of flown-over.
While I don’t think UBI will work, I like some of the other things he’s advocating for in the forward party like open primaries and ranked choice voting. Those may disincentivize extremism on both ends of the spectrum.
Chicago and New York do not belong in the same category as Seattle and SF. Chicago is orders of magnitude better than seattle wrt inequality and poverty
City vs rural have different challenges for one. Cities as a whole seem to lean left but it’s unclear if the policies are to blame or if it’s just a problem of unrelated political factors (eg bussing homeless into cities from red areas to “clean up your streets”)
this is a very a different sort of "bussing", it is state wide allocation of section 8 housing. they're not bussing people if they don't have section 8 already.
Massachusetts does the same thing but from Boston to places like Fall River.
Homeless are being bussed to SF without any housing arrangements.
At the end of the day we have more people coming into our community of who don't feel inclined to contribute to it. The pedantic semantics of the difference is immaterial to my peers and neighbors.
If they're rent is subsidized by the state and they do not work is their contribution a net positive? Many of these people that I've met don't want a W2 or 1099 in fear of loosing their entitlements. The only folks who win there in the long run are landlords (rich getting richer).
Sure some do contribute in a qualitative way to culture and social functions, but not as much economically.
Yes, I'm often accused of being an un-empathic robot, but I can't help looking at this in a macroeconomic sense. Just trying to be intellectually honest with what I see around me in the world.
Do you have any studies you can point me to that shows that Section 8 housing is a net drag on the economy? I haven’t come across such but admittedly I don’t go looking for it either so I’m curious to better understand the themes of what makes it an unsuccessful program and ways to mitigate it. As far as I know, at least based on personal experience, poor people don’t stop being poor people if you take aid away vs give them opportunities to try to better themselves (or at least their child’s lives). And if you think Section 8 housing isn’t rough, all that I’ve seen is not in a state that I’d want to find myself in and I suspect that’s how people there feel too (based on stories I’ve heard told by people from that background).
Results indicate that voucher receipt causes a large increase in violent crime arrests for
male recipients. They do not, however, indicate that vouchers have an effect on women
or on other types of crime. Specifically, we find a statistically significant increase in
violent crime arrests for the overall population and male recipients alone. There are no
statistically significant effects for female recipients alone. This dichotomy in the effects
for male and female housing voucher recipients is consistent with previous research on
the effect of the MTO experiment on juvenile criminal outcomes (Kling et al., 2005,
Sciandra et al., 2013, Zuberi, 2012, and Clampet-Lundquist et al., 2011).
Yeah. God forbid poorer live next to me. You know who else has that mentality? People who are much better off than you and view you as the pots.
You know what’s demonstrably shown to improve moral and connectedness of a society? Being forced to live next to people who are worse off than you so that your self-interest is to vote and advocate on their behalf so that you’re not living in a shithole.
Do you disagree that stratifying people socio economically so that you minimize your interactions with people who are worse off than you sets up a socio economic caste system? Or do you think a caste system isn’t problematic for a society?
The latter; I think it’s folly to deny that social, political, economical, intellectual “caste” systems or hierarchies form naturally on their own, and that they can somehow be abolished through government policy. The beauty of America is that we can break through these barriers if we are truly exceptional and deserve it. And yes, if you are intelligent enough to leverage nepotism, you deserve it. I expect that we will fundamentally disagree on this, as is our right to as free thinking individuals.
I used to be a progressive and used to campaign for candidates. Then I stayed where I am and the rest of the bandwagon moved way way left. So, I will probably vote against any of the "progressive" policies, politicians and elections.
At this point, Florida and Texas have record net in-flux migration from California. Can't wait to see this competition completely kick California's butt. It is a shame, I am stuck here, I'd move otherwise. With all my heart, I want to improve California. I just don't see a way.
And the right-right of 20 years ago feels center today. The left is progressive intentionally by branding. The "conservative" right wing keeps gets more extremist, opposing things as fundamental as elections.
