This is really bad.
And it just adds to a report I just read today in the newspaper of New Orleans not being built up properly - instead, the government shown no will to build up the areas for poorer people at all.
There are a lot more problems in New Orleans than the lack of federal funding. It is by far the most corrupt local government in the US, maybe in western society. Personally, I hope another hurricane hits (but they actually evacuate this time) and destroys it so badly that we realize it is not worth saving. It's sinking into the marsh anyway (hence why Katrina did so much damage) and has had a busted economy for decades. It is a dieing city and we should put it to rest.
As a result, more rich people move in. This can be called "social cleaning", as the title of a German scientific study on these social shiftings says.
We call that gentrifying. I'm looking into a part of Brooklyn that is going through this process. It's a catch 22 though with rebuilding areas. Unless it's a total subsidy by the government, there are very little incentives/options to improve an area's social-economic profile without gentrifying. Of course, if you gentrify, the existing residents get priced out.
The closest thing I've seen to an ideal solution is what NYC does instead of rent control. No new buildings are subject to rent control or rent stabilization (thank God, it's one of the worst run programs in the country), but instead they offer extremely cheap loans to companies in return for reserving a certain portion of the units for lower or middle income families. This can be done for rentals or sales.
There are only two problems with the program:
1) In a really hot real estate market, which NYC is still partially in, a developer can make much more money going about it with private loans than they can by going into the program. So while there are several new complexes each year in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, in the 3 years I've been here there has been exactly one in Manhattan.
2) This ties a bit into 1, but demand for the non subsidized units is dragged down slightly but the subsidized unit, thus depressing the price some and reducing the profit.
The only real way, IMO, to make it effective is do some type of voucher program, and have requirements on it that reward those that take care of their units, don't get in trouble with the law (nothing will bring down property values quicker than a lot of police activity), etc. and punish (IE take away the voucher) for the rest.
M;ore and more I have the feeling as if in the whole "western world" the richer become even more rich and the poorer ones even more poor.
We've seen some extension of the 'wealth gap' in the US recently, but all in all, that gap is much lower than it was pre-WWII, so I think the whole 'rich get richer while the poor get poorer' is pretty overblown, at least here.
For companies, this is ideal: Poor people MUST take any job provided in order to earn as much money as possible. The pressure is on their side.
Companies, however, can refuse to offer higher wages, and cling to low ones instead, because all of the poorer employees won't argue. Because they know if they argue, they'll be fired.
That hasn't really been a problem in the US for a long time in most industries. Unions get a lot of the credit for turning the tide in that manner (which while I despise what many current unions have turned into, I support the concept of unionization), but the real driver is a robust economy/industry. Companies don't want to lose good workers to rival companies and if they don't increase wages over time, assuming they don't have a monopoly, they will lose them to a rival that wants their expertise.
A recent study says that during the last years here in Germany, the people with lower wages got a minus, and the people with better wager got a plus.
So something's going wrong here in Germany, imho. The middle-tier gets heavily eroded.
I read once that the extreme labor laws in Germany are part of the problem. How it's really hard to fire someone. Do you think that factors into the problem?
In the U.S. it is almost non-existent, I once read.
What the middle tier? Or the problem? The middle class is alive and well in the US. Squeezed a bit for sure, but it's certainly not non-existent.