Struggling Community Quotes

I come from Main Street, from a small town that's really depressed.

I grew up in Chillum Heights in the Washington, D.C. area., and it was never a garden spot. When guys go, 'Hey, when I grew up, my neighborhood was tough, and it was this and that'... the reality is that it was just a terribly sad place. And thank God, I was able to escape it.

I'm from Gary, Indiana, and everybody's damn near at the poverty level. It's a rough city to grow up in, and it's a modern-day ghost town.

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

I was living on the wrong side of the tracks in Evanston, Illinois, in a home for boys. We had these Jackson 5 records. I really related to their voices - they were about my age, but they were doing it.

I grew up in the hood in Miami in a poor neighborhood.

You see, for the most part it was a normal upbringing. Sure, there was the Nobel Peace award; sure, there were people coming to our house who I knew were famous. But we grew up in a very modest part of the community. Our last home was in what had been one of the worst ghettos in Atlanta.

I grew up with pretty much nothing - in the hood, the ghetto - whatever you want to call it.

Flint is a very tough place to live. The environment is definitely a different type of environment than anywhere else in the country, I feel like.

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

I was born and raised in the south side of Stockton, California, to a mother still in high school and a father in a juvenile detention facility.

Gary is a really impoverished town; it's in industrial decay. There's low employment and things of that nature.

Well, I grew up in a tough neighborhood.

Detroit was a bad situation for me.

I grew up very poor in rural Alabama.

Being in the neighborhood and the poverty stricken environment that I grew up in, I took a detour. I gravitated towards some of the individuals that did a lot of the wrong things with the right intentions.

I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people... some of the hardest-working people I've ever met.

It was a pretty rough neighborhood where I grew up The really tough places were over around Third Avenue where it ran into the Harlem River, but we weren't far away.

I grew up in Ajegunle, which is like a ghetto and it was very difficult there. When it would get to the weekend, everybody was excited because they wanted to watch Man United play.

I grew up in a little town in Arkansas called Clarksville and it was a weird existence, you know? I grew up white trash; we had holes in our walls.