Re: Are many parts of the US like this?
In LA, there are some really bad blocks of Hyde Park, Skid Row (San Pedro and 5th), 4th and main, some parts of Huntington Park, but I don't think they are bad as the "ghetto" section in other cities. I live in one of the poorest zip codes in my county, but I have a nice house and we have some nice neighborhoods, but we have homeless too. Other places that you see on the news, like the corner of Normandie and Florence, where the riots happened in 1992, it's not all ghetto and scary like it's portrayed. It looks like any other street corner.
North LV Blvd/Fremont area in Las Vegas; main street right through downtown Dallas, TX; the Chandler Park area in Detroit...those are much worse in my opinion. Certainly that neighborhood in Philly is...
I've been to Tijuana and Guadalajara in Mexico, and their slums are way worse than ours in the US. Then again, I've also been to Toronto's "slums", and they're a lot better than ours.
Parts of London may not be as bad as that area in Philly, but you all still have your share of homeless people.
I don't think our homeless issue simply comes from the fact that Americans don't care about each other or we want to keep labor costs down. Yes, there are some Americans who think like that, but there are also a lot of Americans that do care and do want to raise the standard of living for people. But the issues are complicated. We have a very broken health and mental health system here. We don't have a fully private system; we don't have a universal system. We have a half-assed combo system that isn't working. Republicans think a universal health care/mental health system will make us all into a socialist welfare state and Democrats think that if we stay on a private system, doctors and pharmaceutical companies will treat our health like a business. And neither side gets anywhere or works together. So where do the drug-addicted and mentally ill go? On the streets. We're also a lot bigger and have a lot more people than you do. California and New York together, just our two biggest states, equal your 65 million in the UK. It's not just about people not being paid enough for a minimum wage.
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