Current day Poverty
As stated before Detroit is in an economic crisis. Once a great city, it was over reliant on the automobile industry for its success. Detroit at its peak was considered to be the best city in the United states. However, that Detroit is long gone and all that is left are residents hoping for change. Detroit residents are forced to have to either suffer and live day by day or move to the suburbs. Those who stay are forced to stay have to find a job in a very limited job market. They are also forced to have to live off of less than 30,000 dollars per year. The average medium income for Detroit residents of a family of four ranges from 25,000 to 27,000. Those numbers are well below the poverty threshold. Homelessness is also a big issue in Detroit in modern day Detroit, these this issue is a consequence of the lack of income and the high unemployment. To make things worse Detroit residents are not always able to pay for the basic necessities of life such as a roof to live under. Many Detroit residents left the city during this downfall however many of the ones who lived in poverty were forced to stay and fend for themselves. In a recent survey, Studies show that Detroit has approximately 20,000 homeless people. Detroit also holds the highest percentage among big cities for the metro area poverty. Another big issue that has arisen because of poverty is lack of jobs available to the residents who live in metro Detroit. Detroit currently has an unemployment rate of about 12 percent, which isn't as bad as a couple years ago, But when you take into consideration that it almost double that of Michigan's unemployment which is just 5 percent. You can see why there is a big difference when it comes to the surrounding suburbs of Detroit and Detroit. Almost day and night to each other.
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What makes someone poor ?
In our modern day the government uses a poverty line threshold to determine weather or not someone is poor. What is taken into account when determining a threshold a family should be making is how large the family is and how many children they have. The threshold is a bar that is set by the amount of money someone makes. Detroit residents during the 2010 census reported that nearly 41 percent of Detroit residents live under this threshold. Meaning that according to the government nearly half of Detroit is poor, or living in poverty. Out of the 20 top cities in the United states, Detroit had by far had the highest poverty rate out of all of them .
How Detroit residents feel about Detroit ?
Human perspective
From a humanistic perspective, what is happening in Detroit is very sad to witness. Poverty isn't just numbers, these numbers that we see in statistics have a face behind them. The faces behind them, to many people's surprise, are like us, humans. The reason why I say this is that in times like this people are so focused with the numbers that they forget to think back and realize every action that is taken to fix Detroit will have a direct impact to these faces. In my opinion I feel like all people who view the current situation in Detroit don't actually sympathies for them. I feel as though lot's of people view this situation and say "why don't they just move" ? Well that answer is why would you move from a place you love ? Besides that a lot of people are unable to move. The are so poor they have no means of affording to live in the suburbs. However,if I was put into a similar situation and I had lived in Detroit my whole life I wouldn't want to leave just because it is going through a rough patch. As you can see in the video above, Detroit residents are trying to find jobs, they are trying to be a productive member of our society. However, Detroit just doesn't have these business to be able to provide jobs for all the people who reside in Detroit and to me that is very sad. When you think of America you wouldn't be able to imagine that in the so called best country on earth, we would have a major city like Detroit go bankrupt and no one would help them. Even the suburbs around the city are reluctant to provide Detroit with aid nether less other towns or cities in America. But if the reader gets one thing from this is that I just want them to remember that Detroit is much more than statistics these are actual human beings.
Personal Experience
During Spring break, I recently went to Michigan for a relative weeding. During this trip, I managed to convince my parents to drive through Detroit so I could see it firsthand. I was curious to see if Detroit was really as bad as everyone was describing it. During this visit, there were a lot of different things that stood out to me. One of them being, my family and I had to stop to fill our car with gas. So, we stopped at a gas station. I was a bit hungry so I went inside of the gas station to get some food and to use the restroom. The gas station attendant was bam booze led when I asked him if he had a restroom. I however was just as confused as to why I got that sort of reaction from him. So, I asked him why he was surprised, and he responded by saying that hardly any gas stations in Detroit that had a public restroom for people to use. I am still curious as to why that is, he didn't really give me a response as to why exactly gas stations don't have public restrooms. Another thing that stood out to me was how different the suburbs were compared to the city of Detroit. They were polar opposites of each other. The suburb I went to, was really nice, they're were hardly any beat-up houses. You would hardly see vandalism. But when I got to Detroit you could tell that it wasn't the most economically wealthy city. There were a lot of beat up home, lots of vandalism and a lot of abounded and destroyed buildings. It felt like a ghost town, for a big city they're weren't many people around.
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