What community development in heavy populated metropolitan areas mean to some, does not mean the same to most urban residents. Erecting a new shopping plaza or housing subdivision in an urban area would prove a noble deed to most, especially contributing land developers and community activist.

Once the project is complete and it proves to be profitable to the community and its residents, the development is worthwhile. These are positive steps in the direction of community development; however, there is a downside to so-called community development that only the actual occupants of that community experience. This downside is referred to as the urban renewal delusion.

While city politicians sit at round tables and discuss urban renewal projects; make up titles for buddies newly promoted to higher status positions, spend tax-payer's money on trips to warmer climates and on the latest model SUVs that cruise the city overlooking blue collar workers, urban decay sneaks around metropolitan areas like anthrax in a post office.

Disguised as development, commercial and government establishments that do nothing more than psychologically harm inner-city residents erect themselves everyday. Self-righteous capitalist and third world entrepreneurs who buy themselves into business using government monies, make huge profits off the woes and misfortunes of urban dwellers. How? By catering to their inability to measure up to mainstream society.

Instead of using commercial banks and financial institutions, major department stores, auto dealerships, and mortgage companies that finance the average American, urban areas are littered with check cashing places, rent-to-own establishments, buy-here-pay-here car lots, pawn shops, advance payment institutions, fast food restaurants, and convenience and liquor store lotteries. These are the type establishments that drain the urban communities, not develop them.

When fortune 500 (even 1000) companies pack-up and leave the inner cities to sprawl into the suburbs, families that find themselves in one financial crises or another miss the boat and are forced into the urban renewal delusion. Cast out from mainstream society and trapped by higher than average taxed/high-risk areas, they fall to second-class status and victims of the urban business vipers.

This cycle is not community development, but community destruction. Trying to stay ahead in bills and life in general is what city residents face each day as they drive by these establishments out to the suburbs to work for the very companies that abandoned them in the first place. To maintain the true standard of capitalism (which is to keep the worker at a level of poverty which in turn motivates him to work) suburban employers pay just enough to maintain a life of basic survival but not enough to fulfill the so-called American dream.

Because the average worker is paycheck dependant, goods and service establishments in the city base their marketing power on a paycheck bases. Residents are not financially trustworthy enough to qualify for mainstream financing so second rate finance institutions and federally funded organizations compete for the inner city dollar; thus creating the illusion of community development.

The illusion is that residents are not on the upward mobility road but traveling down the road of astronomical interest and percentage rates, overpriced used car payments, one another's appliances, electronics, and clothes, auction bought technology, fatty foods and over advertised legally controlled substances.

In addition to all of the above, inner city residents face the daily reality of unreachable hopes and dreams, media impressionism of a fantasy lifestyle, broken families, drugs, crime, and neighborhoods under-financed for police protection. While the suburbs gain the fortune companies, the generous financial lenders, new and improved goods and services, a larger selection of restaurants, health spas, recreation areas, high society organizations, and safe streets.

If there is a word for this social unevenness, let it be called America, where two worlds exist, the developed and the undeveloped. Separated merely by a corporate boundary line drawn by those whose eyes have looked pass the delusion of urban renewal and saw the reality of commercialism.

To accept life as we know it and as society portrays it, - in all its bureaucratic order, classism, and prosperity - means success, but to know what exist even through eyes blinded by delusionism and continue to live despite, means victim. All people who live beneath the strong holds of second-rate commerce believe they have a choice and much opportunity, but if that is the case, why are they where they are in the first place.

© 2002 By Cartel