The Other America

Amidst the prosperity that many white Americans enjoyed in the 1950s, millions of other Americans lived in poverty. In 1962, about 1 in 4 Americans was living below the poverty level, most of them being elderly people, single women and their children, or minorities.
In the 1950s, millions of middle-class Americans had left for the suburbs, taking all of their resources out and isolating all the other races. Around this time, the rural poor moved to the inner cities. When all of the middle-class white Americans left, the cities lost people and business, and also lost taxes that they were paying for their property. This meant that the city governments could no longer maintain schools, public transportation, and the police and fire departments. However, many of the suburban Americans were ignorant to what was happening to the poor people, refusing to believe that such a thing as poverty existed in a rich nation such as the United States. To spread awareness, Michael Harrington published The Other America: Poverty in the United States that told accounts of what the poor were going through and the reality of poverty.
Minorities such as African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos lived in dirty and crowded slums. To solve the housing problem in the inner cities, there was proposal called urban renewal, which is he tearing down and replacing of buildings in rundown inner-city neighborhoods. In 1949, the National Housing Act was passed to provide a decent home and suitable living environments for every American family for urban renewal.
Although many buildings were torn down due to this act, there was seldom enough new housing to accommodate all the displaced people. Sometimes, like in Los Angeles when a barrio was torn down to make way for Dodger Stadium, this act simply displaced more poor people. These people were then forced to move from one ghetto to another. Due to problems such as these, some critics of urban renewal claimed that it became urban removal.

--Alee