>And, as every Marxist knows, all that wealth (and don't forget that
>there's a lot of
>poverty here for a rich country) comes at some human cost.
>
>Doug
Here's a story about wealth at the front door and human cost at the back:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/08/08/skid_row/print.html
Aug. 08, 2006 | To see the old skid row of the down and out and the new skid row of the well-to-do, look no farther than the Frontier Hotel.
Smack in the heart of the nation's biggest poor neighborhood, the hotel rents to both the poor and the wealthy, albeit through separate entrances.
The Frontier's poor people's entrance, on Fifth Street, has iron gates, burly guards who ask you your business and a long, dark foyer with a clerk behind thick glass. The Main Street entrance, for urban pioneers renting new lofts on the hotel's upper floors, has a gleaming white lobby, potted palms and marble floors.
The Fifth Street renters, who pay about $100 a week, have no access to the Main Street side. And loft dwellers, who pay from about $1,100 a month to $3,900 a month, have no reason to venture to the Fifth Street side, where the hotel is still known as a rundown flophouse, one step up from the streets.
Skid row's new Frontier makes poor people and their advocates shudder. It's not just the hotel, which the owner intends to fully convert to market-rate lofts, that puts them on edge. It's everything, they say, that suggests that the grand plans for the nation's largest skid row -- 50 square blocks of prime real estate in the largest city in the country after New York -- are leaving out the poor, mostly black people who live there now:
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