Youngstown's Cancer Ridden Body

[Rick Rowlands]

The answer involved eliminating section 8 subsidies and closing of public housing projects.  The government subsidizes the people who have plenty of time to destroy and steal and makes it possible for more people to exist here than the city can support with real jobs. 

[Towntalk]

 We keep reading about volunteers giving up of their time cleaning up areas of the city, and this is wonderful, and we thank them from the bottom of our heart, and the cleanup recently on South Avenue ... in fact two cleanups ... are an example.

The leaders of these projects say that it is their hope that the payoff for their efforts will be an incentive for positive growth in those areas, and that is a noble idea, but is it realistic?

At the very same time that we read these positive stories, we also read about crime in these very same areas. In the case of South Avenue two shootings, and the words of one clergyman who's church is on South Avenue when he says that he knows that his church is in a high crime area, and a dangerous one at that.

We all know that we can not afford to write off such streets as South Avenue, Market Street, and Glenwood Avenue, yet we also know that we can not afford to pour the city's limited resources into areas that defy rehabilitation, especially when the people living in those areas sit back and do nothing to bring about change.

Cancer left untreated will spread throughout the body, and the situation that we have in the Sixth Ward is an inoperable cancer that is spreading to other parts of the city, and nothing that has been done to date to stop that spread has worked.

Will reducing the number of wards change things for the better? The answer is no, it will not, for the problem goes much deeper than the number of wards the city has.

The truth of the matter is that the conditions in the 6^th Ward have played an important part in why the city is in the condition we find it today, why our population has been cut in half, why businesses will not locate inside the city, and why many from the suburbs will not attend events held in Youngstown.

What is the answer? I certainly don't have the answer, yet unless we do get an answer soon, that cancer will have spread over the entire city, and no ward will be immune.