to run for these positions like the school board and stuff like that. But administrators, police chief and a host of other positions require a certain amount of education and experience. This is a poor community where most of the people are just struggling to get by. I don't imagine that there is much in the way of well educated financially comfortable people there... those people move to better neighborhoods. That's how poor communities like this get formed. The better off move to greener pastures while more and more of the poor and under educated move in until finally the community is so broken you get a lot of crime, drugs, run down properties and way too many people that have no interest in bettering their circumstances or for whatever reason just can't and some lash out in destructive ways.
This is just what happens when communities become run down to such a point. The only cure for the town itself is outside investment in the community. There's a town near me that we used to call the armpit of the country. Poor housing, poor people, lots of crime and drugs, most of the property both commercial (which there was precious little of) and residential was dilapidated falling apart ruins. Most of the community in the town were black and Latino. Then someone or some company or some developer decided to build a couple a nice office buildings in the center of town. Good companies took up the office spaces. Then a nice hotel sprouted and then more nice office buildings. Property amounts increased astronomically though the residential housing was still crap and unaffordable for the poor that lived there. Once the town was able to offer real opportunity because of the new office buildings and available jobs people bought out the housing - sometimes even a whole block of housing - and renovated it in some cases knocking the houses down and starting over. Prices sky rocketed. The poor in the community couldn't possibly afford to live there anymore so had to move to another poor community as run down as this one had been.
Now it's an expensive trendy town full of office buildings, trendy bars and stores, and I couldn't afford to live there for anything. Only in a few years the whole town went from the armpit of the country to an expensive nice neighborhood, and all that's left of that poor community is a single block right on the smelly as hell river that no one wanted to purchase for anything.
The poor community that used to live there were not lifted up, they were forced out. The businesses that opened didn't have jobs for the poor and under educated of the community and so those jobs were filled by the middle class educated that came from other towns.
A woman I used to work with rented a row home there for nearly 15 years and was a great tenant. Then one day the landlord told her he was TRIPLING the rent, and if she couldn't pay it she had something like 90 days to get out. All he did was paint the interior, slap some aluminum siding on the outside, trimmed the shrubs and right away he had a new tenant happy to get the place at triple the price.
This crap has been going on forever. The poor in the community aren't helped but forced out and have to move to another poor community. Ferguson sounds like one of those towns where investment in the community isn't happening and where the poor run out of other poor communities drifted to.
Communities either get nicer or worse and the poor just get shuffled off to cheaper places that end up becoming the next dilapidated poor and crime riddled neighborhood. Some day Ferguson might be invested in and built up and the poor community there will just get forced off to some other depressed town while Ferguson becomes the next bustling middle class expensive nice mostly white neighborhood full of people that came from some middle class elsewhere.
This country has never given shit one for the under middle class.
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