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| Zhou emphasized that residents living in disadvantaged neighborhoods
are likely to be: 1) socially isolated from mainstream American society with
little contact with whites or the middle class; 2) culturally exposed either
to native-born minority culture that is often oppositional to the mainstream,
or to immigrant cultures from which children often try hard to distance
themselves, or to a materialistic mainstream culture that is over-dramatized
through television; 3) devastated by poverty, substandard living conditions,
unsafe streets, and economic distress; and 4) handicapped by inadequate and
turbulent schools exhibiting low achievement, high dropout rates, high rates
of below-grade level enrollment, overcrowding, violence, and problems with
English.
Migration, noted Zhou, disrupts the normal patterns of social relations and interpersonal interaction between family members and people in the community and undermines the customary agents of social control. Immigrant parents often work several jobs on different shifts in order to meet their needs, she explained, and the result is often that children are undersupervised. Children who actively participate in supervised after-school activities tend to do well in school regardless of race or ethnicity, said Zhou. She further noted that the density of commercial activities enhances neighborhood conditions for investment in other types of enterprises, including those that are educationally-oriented. The density of commercial and social activities encourages people to go out on the street, thereby increasing interpersonal interaction. Furthermore, the diversity and density of ethnic businesses creates job opportunities and role models, attracts the middle-class to return for shopping and cultural activities, and cultivates social ties between the inner-city poor and their middle-class coethnics, which to some extent offsets the negative effects of isolation.
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Neighborhoods and Discrimination
Gregory D. Squires, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at George Washington University, echoed his colleagues in discussing how discrimination affects the quality of life and even the costs of living in neighborhoods. Squires argued that racial segregation, concentrated poverty, and urban sprawl are all pieces of a debilitating process of uneven development that has long plagued metropolitan areas. Racial segregation is taken for granted as a feature of city life in the U.S. today, said Squires. He further noted that closely linked to the processes of segregation are the concentration of poverty within cities and urban sprawl. Neighborhoods throughout metropolitan areas, he added, are paying the costs of racial segregation and uneven development. Perhaps most interesting was Squires' explanation for the urban problems of racial segregation, concentrated poverty, and urban sprawl. Conventional wisdom, he said, suggests that the problems confronting urban neighborhoods generally and racial minorities, in particular, stem primarily from cultural attributes, skill deficiencies, different value systems or other individual characteristics. This is not so, Squires contends. Public policies, past and present, are more significant in creating and perpetuating racial segregation, he said. These policies include racially restrictive covenants, local exclusionary zoning ordinances that restrict affordable housing, concentrating public housing in central city neighborhoods, FHA insurance practices that have long favored predominantly white suburban communities, and federal highway construction and urban renewal programs that destroy many predominantly non-white inner city neighborhoods to facilitate commuter access to the suburban ring.
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