Word: urbanity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Americans said homelessness--more than crime, the budget deficit, education or the decline of American values--was "the main problem facing the country today." Only half as many people now believe that. "Most of the emphasis today is on the feel-good," says Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who founded a New York City homeless agency in 1986. "People don't want to focus on problems. But there's also the sense that the problem is apparently getting better...
...come by. In the early '80s Mitch Snyder, the late founder of the Center for Creative Non-Violence, an advocacy group in Washington, claimed that there were 3 million homeless in America on any given night. He later admitted that he'd made up the figure. A 1988 Urban Institute survey offered an estimate of 600,000 homeless; but after the 1990 Census, the General Accounting Office put the number at 300,000. A 1994 study examined computer data on shelter turnover rates from 1988 to 1992 and found that between 5 million and 7 million Americans had been homeless...
Ultimately, the best explanation for why Americans stopped talking about homelessness lies not in policies or public opinion but in politics. In the '80s liberal advocacy for the homeless was of a piece with Democratic outrage at Reagan Administration policies toward the poor. But the homeless issue also splintered urban liberalism, sending some working- and middle-class voters into the arms of Republicans who vowed to curtail entitlements and tighten the screws on vagrancy. To survive, Democrats revised their image as the party of the dispossessed by acceding to welfare reform, cutting aid to the homeless and courting the middle...
...Some say they don't pay much attention to the lyrics, they just like the beat. "I can't relate to the guns and killings," says Mehr. Others are touched more deeply. Says 15-year-old Sean Fleming: "I can relate more and get a better understanding of what urban blacks have to go through...
...songs will tend to be from a narrow range of tastes--the rule in commercial radio is "specialize to capitalize." If you want to hear a broader range of music, you have to look elsewhere. This is as true of classical music, for example, as it is of "urban contemporary." When you get tired of hearing Beethoven's Fifth for the 900th time, it's time to tune out Classical 102.5 WCRB and tune in WGBH 89.7 or WHRB...