What Does Obama Really Believe In?, By Paul Tough, August 15, 2012, New York Times Magazine: “From the back seat of Steve Gates’s white Pontiac, Monique Robbins spotted Jasmine Coleman walking home from school alone. It was an icy December afternoon on Chicago’s South Side, and Jasmine’s only protection against the wind was a thin purple jacket. She looked cold. Gates pulled the car over to the curb, and Robbins hollered at Jasmine to get in. Jasmine was 16, and Robbins and Gates, who were both in their 30s, were her neighbors. All three of them lived in or around Roseland, a patch of distinctly subprime Chicago real estate that stretches from 89th Street to 115th Street, way down past the last stop on the El. Fifty years ago, Roseland was a prosperous part of Chicago, home to thousands of blue-collar workers, most of them white, employed by the South Side’s many steel and manufacturing plants. But the plants closed long ago. . .”
Tag: Urban poverty
Poverty Rate – London, UK
Poverty is shifting from inner to outer London, report finds, By Simon Rogers and Hélène Mulholland, April 11, 2012, The Guardian: “Outer London has seen rising levels of poverty while the number of poorer areas in central London is reducing, according to a new analysis of official deprivation data. Although the poorest places in the capital are still in the eastern centre of the city, there are fears that poverty is being pushed out into the suburbs amid evidence of a significant increase in deprived areas in the outer boroughs between 2004 and 2010…”
UNICEF Report: State of the World’s Children 2012
- Make children the cornerstone of urban decision-making, urges Unicef, By Mark Tran, February 28, 2012, The Guardian: “Unicef has urged governments to put children at the heart of urban planning – and to improve services for all – since the majority of the world’s children will grow up in towns or cities rather than in rural areas. In its report, The State of the World’s Children 2012: Children in an Urban World, the UN agency said hundreds of millions of children who live in urban slums are being excluded from vital services, from clean water to education…”
- Split between rich and poor greater in cities, UNICEF reports, By Leslie Scrivener, February 28, 2012, Toronto Star: “Five-year-old Kiara appears well cared for – nicely dressed, well-fed and loved. Her hair shines. But she has worked with her family since she was three, selling trinkets in the subway trains of Buenos Aires. There have been mishaps: she has fallen onto the train tracks while playing, and last year she broke her arm in a train door. Almost half the world’s children live in cities. Their families are lured from their rural homes, hoping to find jobs for themselves and education for their children. It doesn’t always work out that way. ‘It’s heartbreaking for parents,’ says David Morley, president and CEO of UNICEF Canada. ‘They don’t want their children working on the street. They wish they had enough.’ In its annual report, released on Tuesday, UNICEF explores the struggles faced by families raising their offspring in the world’s slums, where one in three city-dwellers now live…”
- World’s slum children in desperate need, UNICEF says, By Robyn Dixon, February 28, 2012, Los Angeles Times: “You see them, night and day, in nearly every African city. They are ragged children dodging between the cars: beggars, shoeshine boys, teenage prostitutes, petty traders and porters carrying loads on their heads with thin, pinched faces and anxious eyes. They tap on car windows, begging, and wait by the highway desperate to sell their goods. Around half the people in the world live in cities and towns, a billion of them children, as the urban population spirals. Millions of children live in slums and shantytowns and they’re dying of the same illnesses that kill the rural poor, according to UNICEF: hunger, diarrhea and disease caused by poor sanitation and overcrowding…”