Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ How did a lack of foresight in city planning throw Salisbury down the well of soaring poverty? Let us count the ways:
• Making Salisbury an extremely attractive venus fly trap for poverty by:
–Forcibly annexing poor neighborhoods to stoke up the city’s ability to get grants based on poverty and substantially raising our poverty rates.
–Forcibly annexing the County’s high-rise prison to raise the city’s poverty rates to get more grant money. It worked.
–Taking grant money and building a large number of public housing units that serve as a beacon to attract more poor to our area.
–Providing grant money to build the largest and most modern homeless shelter in North Carolina which makes Salisbury attract more poor.
–Failure to block the influx of homeless transients to the city’s “tarps cities” down by Town Creek and the Bury’s hobo jungles.
With the city’s swelling numbers of homeless and poor, comes the difficulties of gangs, high violent crime rates, the proliferation of heroin, meth, and crack, low educational scores in our city’s schools, and high rates of illiteracy.
The city stood back and thwarted economic development and jobs here by tacitly okaying the blocking of potential chain retail and businesses that might compete with “Salisbury’s favored family” interests. As you can see City Hall blocked both the county and the city’s economic growth for a favored few. Salisbury over the last decade became a bombed out place to avoid. An seedy pox upon Rowan County.
As opportunities for jobs here grew sparse in Salisbury, higher income families moved away thus adding to the city’s rising poverty rates.
Overcoming Salisbury, N.C.’s 25% Poverty:
http://rowanfreepress.com/new-overcoming-salisbury-n-c-s-25-poverty/
