“Inner Cities”, Evictions, and a Potential Work Relief Program
Ever since the first time the concept of “inner cities” was brought up by Donald Trump, former Republican presidential candidate and the new president-elect of the United States, much attention has been paid to this subject, both from voters and the media. In his “‘Inner Cities’ and the New Geography of Inequality”, Ian has written a great piece covering this subject.
After the debate, on 10/26/2016, in Charlotte, NC, Trump delivered a speech on his proposal on “urban renewal and inner cities”. However, I found no concrete plan for how he is going to improve the conditions in the inner cities.
Trump reminded the American people about the “inner cities” again in his victory speech:
“We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none, and we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”
The reality is that inner city is a complicated problem that involve numerous political and socioeconomic issues.
Many who live in the inner cities cannot even guarantee their housing. Number of evictions are soaring in cities like Milwaukee, WI, as Matthew Desmond points out in his book ‘Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City’. I have not finished reading this book but I think it provides great examples to learn about evictions in one of the poor inner cities in the Midwest. Among all the reasons for evictions, failure to pay for the rent is the most common. Getting evicted means a series of hardship family, and many low income families cannot survive after multiple evictions. They will either settle for homeless lives or consistently move to neighborhoods that have worse conditions.
However, one interesting practice that Desmond reveals, is that some landlords would allow tenants to not pay a certain amount of rents by helping out repairing or renovating the residences. If renters can pay their rents by physical works, so can the city governments step in and incorporate a work relief program that recruits residents to work on projects in rebuilding infrastructures in the inner cities and subsidize their housing expenses on top of the salaries. And it looks like something the new president is interested to do, if he eventually choose to keep his promises made during his campaigns.
Theoretically, the program would benefit the inner cities by creating more jobs for local low income households, reducing the number of unemployments, promoting the community’s sense of ownerships and improving infrastructures, just to list a few. The question is that programs like this are expensive, and the federal government has already got a lot of deficits. Although it is not realistic to pull out something like the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, which enabled the federal government to hire millions of employees to work on public works projects, the new government might be able to experiment on several cities.
(On a side note, eviction is not exclusive for “inner” cities. Below is a plot that shows the number of scheduled evictions in each zipcode areas in New York City. Neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn has the most number of evictions on average. In each of the dark green zipcode area on the top of the encircled New York City map, there has been at least 4,000 residents that were evicted from the past months. )
