CY PLAN 113B Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Kerner Commission, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jacob Riis
22 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
A Uee Ladsape of Poerty & Opportuity January
4, 8
• Poverty in the US
o Poverty rate is a metric to judge how well community development intervention has worked
o There are around 40 million people in poverty (12.7%)
o Base level of survival: minimum amount of money people would need to feed themselves
o Poverty line: $24,000 for a family of 4
• Place-based poverty – early idustrial slus ad settleet houses
o Jacob Riis: people that lived in concentrated poverty in NY
o Settlement houses: placed in struggling communities in order to reform these
neighborhoods; focused on education and children
▪ Origins of the intervention of poverty
• The Great Depression
o Hit everybody, except the rich, elite households - there was massive unemployment
o Hooerille’s eerged o the outskirts of eery ity
o Place-based intervention is replaced with societal intervention
o Urban poverty is a condition of not being employed and having enough housing
• The Urban Crisis
o After WWII, the war effort changed the landscape of industries in the US
o Emergence of racial riots in every major inner city around the country; the military was
needed to push back the riots
o Kerner Commission: 11-person task force appointed by Lyndon Johnson to study the causes
of the race riots in the US
▪ Johnson ignored all the recommendations and identifications of structural changes in
the oissio’s report
o Between 1965-1990, there is a continued decline in the inner city, disinvestment, increase in
strife, increase in White Flight, increase in studies about urban cities
▪ Leads to increase in policing strategies rather than looking into structural factors
• Causes of the inner-city/urban crisis
o Economic change
▪ Decline in living wage, unskilled, manufacturing jobs in the US = less opportunities in
these urban neighborhoods (24 to 13%)
• At the same time, there is an increase in skilled jobs (ie: finance, real estate)
▪ Rise of single parent households: prevalent in inner-city neighborhoods; especially
important with the trend to the need of a 2-parent household to support the family
▪ Welfare Queen (1960s): derogatory term used in the U.S. to refer to women who
allegedly misuse or collect excessive welfare payments through fraud, child
endangerment, or manipulation
• If you do’t deostrate perfet ehaior, your elfare ill e take aay
from you
o Demographic change
▪ Patterns of immigration: wave of migration post-1965, coming with lower resources
and less education
• Creates racial and ethnic tensions against the new immigrant groups
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