I’m in need of this shower thought that I have.
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We can.
But nobody does. Or, if they do, it’s a token, one time effort that doesn’t address the source of poverty and inequality, like predatory landlords or substandard education/healthcare.
Well that’s the idea behind a lot of programs, but after decades of negative feedback loops it’s not really that easy.
The population doesn’t have valuable skills, those will need to be taught.
The area doesn’t have good infrastructure, that will need to be built.
The area doesn’t have an existing business pool to supply new businesses with parts and resources, those will need to be brought in from somewhere else.
How do you recommend we stream the money through? Where does this money come from?
Trying to get the outcome you want is much more complicated than simply throwing money at the problem. As always, the devil is in the details.
Because those are just words.
What do you mean by “stream more money through”? How much money? Where is it coming from? Where is it going? Who is going to manage it? What is it going to be spent on? For how long are you going to do it?
What do you mean by “create jobs”? What jobs are you going to create? How are you going to create them? How are you going to hire for them?
Sure you can wave your hand and go “just stream more money and create jobs” but the reason no one does “that” is because that is not a well formed strategy and coming up with a well formed strategy is kind of hard and is something we’re already doing in various degrees in countries all over the world.
We can, but that requires someone to do something about it.
Governments often address only token issues rather than addressing underlying causes of poverty.
People don’t want to pay more in taxes for social programs to fix the underlying problems.
Low income housing for example is frequently stopped by the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) crowd because low income housing is seen as bringing crime into an area.
Education for example is paid for with school taxes from the region. So a poor area doesn’t want to raise taxes to pay for better education. The fix is to even out the education budget across a State.
Raising the minimum wage is another obvious one, as many poor families have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. This means less free time, and less time to care for their own kids. But there’s a lot of resistance against this.
Free medical care, child care, and mental health treatments is another one that would help a lot but again that costs money.
Free education is another one. An adult has a hard time going back to school to get a better education because higher education is expensive, and you still have to put food on the table
Another good one is to reform the prison system.
This is a big thing my industry – construction.
There are many programs set up to try and either funnel money to minority owned business and or employ people of local communities.
The pattern is circular and hard to break. People in these communities often *lack* skills, access to the internet (for things like applying for jobs) and often have disqualifiers like criminal backgrounds and drug problems. Sincerely, the good apple outliers, those who are out there hustling to make legitimate money find companies like my own tripping over themselves to hire them.
More significantly, while many organizations support causes like they, no one wants the responsibility. For example, my local government might declare they want me to contract with minority owned businesses that they themselves have certified as being minority owned. However PROVING that they are ACTUALLY minority owned falls on us, if we hand them back their own certificates they can sue us for falsification of business records (saying this company was minority owned and they in fact weren’t)
Finally, there is a massive amount of ineptitude in those that run this stuff. I literally had a client demand that a project had 40% “local” employment. “What’s local?” I asked. He sent me back a google map of my local city large enough to encompass neighboring states. I ended up losing the job to a company that found a college kid, paid him to start his own business (he was black) and then they Joint Ventured with him to claim they were 50% minority owned. This is absolutely what happens and it also creates a preventative ceiling on legitimate minority owned businesses trying to get into my industry.
Would money streaming in change the root cause of poverty? No, or the last dozen programs that did that would have fixed it.
The process is then called gentrification and it then tends to price some people out of the housing in that area.
There are some efforts doing exactly this but it is not easy. Firstly you are taking tax money away from richer residents and giving to the poorer residents in a city which the rich residents do not like. They might do things like moving to another city reducing the tax income that is needed to pay for the improvements of the poorer areas.
But even when you try to improve a poor area there are lots of systemic issues that is harder to solve then just with a bit of money. You soon discover that nobody will go to the new schools and libraries that were built because they have to work for food because they do not have an education for a high skilled job. So you end up having to spend lots of money on school meals. Then you have people desperate for cash ending up breaking into the newly built institutions to steal whatever is worth something. So you need to spend money replacing broken and stolen equipment, hire security guards and build security barriers. You end up spending a lot more money on the same kind of care that would be required in richer parts of town.
And then you have all the social, mental and physical health issues as a result of growing up in a poor neighborhood to poor parents. Some of it might be what caused them to move there in the first place as they could not get a living wage with the health issues they had. A lot of these people will never be able to do well in life but you still need to help them so they do not ruin it for the rest and maybe give them a decent life.
And then when you are able to see some results from all your effort there are some people able to get a good education and end up in a high earning job. Then they have enough money to move across town where the view is better, the utilities are much better, the air is much cleaner and there are less noise. And people from these richer areas start coming to the poor neighborhoods looking for cheap housing as they have lost their jobs and have run through all their life savings for various reasons.
So while we are working on improving the poorer neighborhoods in cities it is an uphill battle. The best you can do is to somewhat equalize the quality of life in various parts of the city but you will never be able to eliminate it. The last bit to reach equality is very expensive and is not something our civilization wants. There have been several attempts at this in communist authoritarian countries and they have failed miserably when trying to create complete equality for everyone.
There programs and organizations that do this, here are some of my observations as someone who has worked in non-profit orgs before.
– It takes a long for these initiatives to make an impact.
– If the program or money isn’t consistent or doesn’t help people transition into a more stable stream of income, then the help is only temporary. This is why good housing and employment programs include plans for a continuum of care to make the transition better.
– When people get those opportunities, they leave the community and don’t come back. For example, kids from underprivileged areas get aid and scholarships to go to university and do not bring their education and skills back to better it. The same thing happens in the Midwest/poor rural communities (brain drain).
– When you begin making the communities better and bigger businesses start moving in you start to price out the people in the community that was in need of the help. Maybe they get to sell their house for a profit but now they have to leave, and their kids can no longer afford to live in the community that they grew up in.
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