Urban Neglect Quotes

… the sweepings of the New York streets.

The pigeons are shitting on George M. Cohan. I shoo them off. They fly up and perch on his hat. Cohan would've never given his regards to Broadway if he saw how dirty they kept his statue in Duffy Square. New Yorkers walk right by. Nobody cares.

Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.

We always hear Compton and Long Beach, but Watts is always overlooked.

Omaha is a little like Newark, without Newark's glamour.

His whole being radiates a pure, wild sweetness, flitting through night woods with little melodious cries, on some cryptic errand. There is also an aura of doom and sadness about this trusting little creature. He has been abandoned many times over the centuries, left to die in cold city alleys, in hot noon vacant lots, pottery shards, nettles, crumbled mud walls. Many times he has cried for help in vain.

Detroit can't come close to repairing the decades of neglect without addressing the crisis in our neighborhoods. I live in southwest Detroit near Woodmere Cemetery. My neighbors and I deal with the negative impacts of job loss, increased poverty, and pollution every day.

If those communities are left to decay, this city will decay.

I've been in many of them and to some extent I would have to say this; if you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

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.

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.

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.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.

Downtown Detroit has more vacant buildings over 10 storeys than any city in the world.

The streets are very narrow, and many of them crowded, nine tenths dirty, and all without foot pavements. Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and a fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed woman.

Oh well, maybe the only beauty left in cities is in the oil slicks on the road and maybe there isn't any beauty left in the people who live in these places.

The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year. We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete, and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds.

New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

The Bronx always seemed very dreary to me.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

We make a mistake when we stereotype neighborhoods as 'bad' and not worth our attention or investment.