Urban Disparity Quotes

New York City has an integration problem.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.

When we were bringing 'Raisin' onto Broadway, our first stop was at Arena in D.C. Several things struck me about being in D.C.: One was the enormous poverty around the capital at that time - it was 1973, '74 - and I was stunned by people literally living in poverty, with holes in their houses and other things.

San Francisco can no longer afford to be a city divided between downtown and neighborhoods, with a downtown that becomes a ghost town when workers go home for the evening.

I've said this before: a homeless guy in Detroit has more mojo than a millionaire in Jacksonville.

Staten Island is segregated, but it's also - I don't know. It's, like, it's not - it's not unprogressive.

I grew up in an area that was the typical city that was a racially divided and economically segregated place. And it had a big influence on me.

Take a walk around many of our cities and you will find areas of deprivation, high worklessness and educational failure only yards from areas of prosperity and employment.

a kid should have an equal shot at a good life in our city, regardless of what part of town they happen to be born in.

The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.

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.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

The architecture per se isn't at fault. The more important factor, in my view, is the political neglect of these areas, which have essentially been cut off from other neighborhoods.

I live in San Francisco, I live in Provincetown. They're all the same, apart from Baltimore. Baltimore's the only cheap place left.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.

There are two Baltimores. There are clearly two Baltimores.

New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.

Johannesburg is weird, because half of it is like Los Angeles. It feels like just wealthy parts of L.A. But half of it is severe slummy, something like Rio De Janiero or something. So it's kind of weird, because it's both happening at the same time.

I was motivated to go into public life because of the great chasm that exists between justice and injustice in our country. Nowhere is that divide greater than in America's cities.

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.

In the days and months I spent walking through the various communities of this city, I found that Chicago did not work for everyone, however.

In Africa, you have no clean water, but you have good food options. In Harlem, everyone can shower and get fresh water, but you often have bad food options.