Ghetto In The 19th Century

The American Ghetto To an extent Ghetto’s have always existed within the United States. Beginning with the Five Points Area of New York City in the late 18th century every city in the United States has had neighborhoods where the poor, the recent immigrant, the desperate, and the criminal have made their homes. However; it was only in the late 19th century that the systematic poverty in the ghetto and related problems such as, alcohol and drug abuse, child abuse and neglect, spousal abuse, and crime came to the public’s attention through the work of settlement workers such as Jane Addams and journalists like Jacob Riis. The 20th century saw a rise of crime within ghetto neighborhoods as well as the first signs that poverty was becoming a multi-generational cycle within many families. The main reason for this appears to be the combined result of the very high levels of immigration from Europe during the early 20th century in combination with the Great Migration of Southern African Americans that occurred simultaneously with the final large wave of European immigration.
When one looks at these waves of immigration/migration in
First, Roosevelt’s New Deal and the economic policies of WWII drew many people to the cities for jobs in the war industry, or for Works Progress Administration (WPA) jobs in the 1930’s and 1940’s. This was cemented in the 1960’s with the social safety net policies of Johnson’s “Great Society” that essentially created a multi-generational cycle of poverty that has not changed no matter how many reforms are made to the welfare system (Warren, 2017). Warren (2017) suggests that the main problem with these policies is that they were not tailored to help urban minorities out of poverty and that many programs did not meet the specific needs of the community in terms of housing, employment, and education and vocational