Quote:
Originally Posted by arista
Maru
I know you are nowhere near Chicago
But is this shocking to you? |
No. Not from what I know. You might find similar statistics in isolated zips in the South. It's less about the crime, though that will cause it to peak, but also lifestyle choices mixed with poverty.
In deeply urban and ethnic areas, we eat good lol. Black Americans genetically are more predisposed to things like heart disease and chronic disease. I have seen that in lots of friends who are from NOLA (New Orleans). Americans eat terribly, especially poorer people or people from cultures that center around food (not just blacks). American culture is built around food in urban centers. Houston is particularly bad about this but we also have a very good medical infrastructure and our populations are more transient (they move between burbs more and State to State), so you wouldn't see it play out in neighborhood-specific statistics as much.
Up north, populations at lower income levels are sometimes far less transient, because of both concentration of cultural centers and distance making it more difficult to leave/change fields and so those neighborhoods have families with longer footprints. It's not like that in the South because there is more mobility both job-wise and economically.
Baltimore had this problem when we were leaving in that area and pretty much everyone we spoke who should probably move either couldn't or didn't have any kind of connections that could help them setup elsewhere. That turns to hopelessness quickly, especially if they are disabled or have a record, which many can get at a young age... then it becomes very difficult to find better work and they can't get affordable housing sometimes because of not just criminal history, but bad credit. And chronic poverty, but not being in assisted living, can be very deadly for the elderly especially.