Word: slum
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Another group helped to rehabilitate three homes belonging to the South End Tenants Council, a predominantly black group that controls 30 housing units formerly owned by a slum landlord...
Other times, the sayings of Spiro are merely camp?howling violations of political politesse. "If you've seen one slum," he declared during the campaign, "you've seen them all." The odd thing is that the line makes a certain cockeyed sense: there is a miserable monotony about urban slums. If Agnew had made the point with any sensitivity, the effect would have been the opposite of the one he achieved...
Babylon, for example, was the first great city of the ancient world; according to the Bible, it was "the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth." Ancient Athens, for all its architectural and intellectual glory, was scarcely more than an overgrown slum; the grandeur of Rome was overshadowed by its ramshackle ghettos, crime rate and traffic jams. Sanitation was so bad in the Paris of Louis XIV that two miles from the city's gates a traveler's nose would tell him that he was drawing near. Scarcely anyone today needs to be told about how awful...
...present, the so-called solutions are grim and inadequate if not absurd. Many big-city slum schools have installed special lighting, hidden microphones, and burglar-alarm systems. New York City policemen often patrol their beats inside the schools. Yet exporting the custodial techniques of Sing Sing to the schools hardly creates authentic discipline, much less an atmosphere conducive to learning...
...even by elements of the fragmented housing industry itself. Until now, the existing scheme of things has been supported by public ignorance and apathy. Yet millions of people are being victimized-the mobile executive who cannot afford a comfortable house, the city resident in the greatly overpriced apartment, the slum dweller who has a tough time finding any housing that qualifies as decent. The lives of these people are indeed being shaped by the buildings in which they live, and they are impatient for change...