Urban Disadvantage Quotes

In America, the problems of poverty and low income, particularly for minorities, are disproportionately focused in the inner cities. Shining a spotlight on the businesses growing in these communities is proof that any community has the potential for entrepreneurship.

Poor children in Baltimore face even worse odds than low-income kids elsewhere, mostly because they remain in impoverished neighborhoods.

There's no reason why children in inner cities or rural areas do not receive the same quality education or opportunities as those in suburbs or wealthy neighborhoods. If we truly believe in giving all citizens a chance to pursue happiness and pursue their goals, then we cannot continue to marginalize entire groups of people.

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city's disinherited.

What a miserable place a city is for poor people.

Most insurance companies are run by white males who have little appreciation for the problems of minorities in the core cities.

Many places in the Bronx seem hidden in shadows, just as the Bronx itself is in Manhattan's shadow. And dark stories develop best in dark shadows.

[Describing London:] Close to the splendid houses of the rich such a lurking place of the bitterest poverty may also be found.

What kind of society have we become when children in a great city cannot rely on mothers or fathers for a bowl of cereal in the morning and a brown bag with a sandwich and apple in it for lunch?

There is a lot of talent and a lot of good things happening and coming from Molenbeek, but unfortunately, it has had to deal with a very, very long time of being ignored, really, and it was very easy, even in the neighbourhood where I grew up, to just fall off the grid, and nobody would notice it.

'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.

I'm an inner city man, born and bred.

There are two New Yorks - Manhattan and everything else. I'm a Manhattanite. I feel sorry for those people who aren't.

In other countries, it's a common thing to have outcast children running around the streets in packs, and I don't think we're so far away from it here.

Cities tend to be representations of societies: diversity and inequality find their extremes in urban settings. Yet, when war is added onto pre-existing inequalities, high levels of poverty, or even disaster, urban fragility increases exponentially, making it harder to absorb the shocks of warfare.

No city in Italy contains so many miserable beggars, and no town in the world so many blind.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

I'm from Queensbridge. It's the largest housing project in New York. And growing up in Queens, it was different because I wasn't really experienced in traveling to the City. I never really got used to the City.

In cities like Athens, poor houses lined narrow and tortuous streets in spite of luxurious public buildings.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

I grew up in Brooklyn, in what I now know was poverty. Sharing a tiny bedroom with my two brothers, eating government cheese and passing down sneakers until they were unpassable... I simply thought the whole world lived as such, especially in pre-gentrified Williamsburg of the 1980s.

Growing up in the ghetto is pretty hard. It's poverty; it's frustration.