Underclasses and Yuppies

Underclasses and Yuppies

• Valentine Ch 7: esp. 213-223

The Underclass

• Those at the bottom of the social order– Persistent, intergenerational poverty– Welfare-dependent– Unstable employment– Low skills– Poor education

The Underclass

• Cultural meaning– Associated with public housing, inner city

poverty, appears on COPS & reality TV

• Codeword for “race” in USA– Underclass associated with ghettos

• Does the underclass actually exist?– Valentine accepts this without question– actually debatable

The Underclass

• Karl Marx 1860s: Underclass = the proletariat, workers whose only possessions are their children

• Gunnar Myrdal 1962: Underclass = those excluded from the urban labour market by structural economic change

• New Right 1980s: Underclass = lazy poor people gripped by “dependency culture”

Culture of Poverty

• Associated with US anthropologist Sinclair Lewis– From 1960s onwards argued that poverty

becomes a culture, a way of life– People can’t easily escape it: they become

cultured into being poor

The Underclass

• New left 1980s: Underclass produced by a combination of– structural economic change (Myrdal)– cuts in welfare provisions (New Right)

Some realities

• Social polarization did increase in UK & North America from 1970s onwards– rich getting richer, poor getting poorer

Some realities

• “Underclass” is actually very varied, very mixed– In USA potentially multiracial, multilingual,

multiethnic

Some realities

• Some connection between culture and structural change

Bea Campbell - UK

• Structural economic change: UK working-class males unable to realize masculine identity through work, income or property

• UK working-class males define masculinity around alcohol, drugs, car theft, soccer hooliganism, and macho misbehaviour

Gentrification

• Middle-class people moving into inner city areas and taking them over as residential and recreational areas– middle-class once avoided the inner city (where

poor people lived)– middle-class able to choose where they live

Gentrification

• First signs in later 1960s, becomes more common in 1970s

• Widespread in 1980s

Georgetown DC

• Boston North End

Brooklyn Hts NYC

• Brooklyn Hts

• Amsterdam

Gentrification

• Changes property values– capital moves back into the city– prices the poor out of the market

• Transforms the inner-city built-environment

• Transforms the inner-city social environment

• animation

Gentrified Landscapes

• Become places of consumption

• People want to “buy-into” a lifestyle as well as a place

• Suits a contemporary middle-class lifestyle and gender relations

Toronto: Cityplace.ca

Sexual Dissidence

• Emergence of visibly gay neighbourhoods etc.,

• Tolerance of sexual difference easier in the big city?

SF Castro• San Francisco’s Castro

district emerges as a gay village 1940s onwards

• Bohemian urban culture

• Institutional networks: Bars and clubs

• Eventually a residential expression– gay gentrifiers

• Castro

Toronto Cabbagetown

• Apartment towers of St Jamestown become a bohemian environment from 1960s– Becomes a gay village

• Gay gentrifiers a key component in mid 1970s gentrification of Cabbagetown

Florida Thesis

• Urban creativity a result of bohemian culture– bars and clubs vital to a creative urban culture– perhaps gay bars especially