The Patriot Post® · Democrats Perpetuate Urban Poverty

America’s major cities are showing increasing signs that decades of leftist Democrat policies are leading to greater dysfunction, growing crime rates, and lower standards of living. The Democrats who run these cities seek to shift the blame for the sad state of their communities onto the boogiemen of “racism” or Republicans, when in fact they are the ones responsible for enacting the policies that led to these cities’ current conditions.

There is also the problem of a shrinking middle class in major urban centers. Joel Kotkin, writing for the OC Register, notes, “Since the 1970s the middle class in cities has been in a precipitous decline while poverty has remained stubbornly high. Philadelphia’s central core, for example, rebounded between 2000 and 2014, but for every one district that gained in income, two suffered income declines. In 1970, half of Chicago was middle class; today, according to a new University of Illinois study, that number is down to 16 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of poor people has risen from 42 to 62 percent.”

Kotkin further notes, “The most attractive blue cities — led by New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and Boston — now suffer, according to Pew research, the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles of all U.S. cities.”

One would think Democrat leaders in Baltimore, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — cities that find themselves awash in poverty-related homelessness and violence — would be working to aggressively solve these problems as soon as possible. However, many Democrat politicians are insulated from the effects of their policies because much of the old urban middle class has moved to the suburbs. Meanwhile, the Millennial hipsters attracted to these urban environments are politically more concerned over broadly nebulous leftist issues, like climate change and social justice versus the more practical and local issues like the fixing of roads and more housing availability.

In short, the Democrats who have long run America’s largest cities are failing the very ones who voted for them.