I live in a ghetto. It's a nice looking one and It didn't always use to be a ghetto. A pretty respectable place for it's time. The city has let the roads decay pretty badly and with corruption, under the table deals, and misuse of funds the cities response to the problem is to basically have a guy with hot asphalt and a pick up truck fill a hill and wack and compact the asphalt, then drive off to the next road.
The process is often quick and messy. The asphalt on the ground looks loose and makes the rest of the street look ugly. In addition to that they it creates little mounds which makes the street bumpy. Within three weeks most of the fresh asphalt will have eroded and you will quickly forget that their was a patch their. It's pretty bad too if you have just a hole with dirt. Meanwhile on the nice side of town where they are putting up new cheaply made housing they'll gladly tear up a nice street and repave the road and paint it too just make the area look new so that people will buy homes over there.
Meanwhile down here you have these unique and probably sturdier homes being bought out, fixed up, then rented out to people. A lot of the people who rent these homes are often mean, or have kids who want to live the hood life and cause trouble. Many of them only speak Spanish while their kids are either learning English or speak for the family because they are bilingual.
I've had my garage tagged numerous times, which for those you who don't know tagged means that your property got graffitied on. Here you have to paint over it as soon as possible, otherwise the city sends you a nasty letter which says that you have to paint over it out of your own pocket or you'll fined. Also instead of deterring graffiti, the city just harasses the victims rather than tracking the people that do it. One time there was tag that said "RIP JULIO". Painted over it and within the same day and got harassed by some kids who gathered outside of my living room window. They pounded on it, yelled forget you bitch and me and my dad chased them off. They came back several nights, threw rocks at our windows, and would come back again several times to yell inside of our house. My brother even knew one of them from his class, some kid who always picked on him and had been sent to the office on numerous occasions.
You also probably wondering if we called the police. We did, and they arrived long after they had left and simply said not to chase them off. The life of a gang member here is short since they teach us in Criminology that they start as young as 10 or 11 and live to about their early 20s if not less than that, or they find themselves in prison. They are probably with Julio right now, or probably with whoever killed Julio.
There is one other story, but I fear for my life if I were to tell it. The only new recent addition here are the homeless who have grown in numbers over the past few years. A lot of them look really old, probably middle aged at best, however with drug use and exposure to the elements they look like senior citizens and zombies. They litter the parks, dig through cans for trash, travel in caravans which consist of bicycles with homemade trailers full of their belongings, or a stolen shopping cart. They are mostly white trash junkies who leave used syringes lying around on the ground.
I don't like what my neighborhood has become, the city has played a part in ruining it, the people who rent out and rent homes ruined it, the hoodrats made it more degrading, and the homeless just make this place feel even more like a dump.
