The thesis is transparently false. While the deprivations of poverty may be exacerbated by exploitative business practices, they are self-evidently caused by a lack of income. Software developers in San Francisco or lawyers in NYC may complain about high rents, but they are not impoverished by those rents. Someone living on $733/mo of SSI remains poor even if their rent is free.
The author mentions a significant root cause in the first paragraph - de-industrialisation. Like so many other American cities, Milwaukee was relatively prosperous before the collapse of the manufacturing industry.
Improved regulation of the rental market would be a minor improvement at best. It's wishful thinking to imagine that poverty could be fixed quickly and at negligible cost to the taxpayer. The problems of poverty are systemic and so are the solutions - better welfare provision, better education, better support for job creation. If we wish to see an end to poverty, we must be willing to pay for it.
Poverty is more than lack of money. Lots of people lack funds, but would violently disagree with you assessing them as poor.
Think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- people need a base to function properly. When your home can vanish in an instant, it changes your mental stance and influences your behavior negatively.
Government is supposed to represent the people, not slumlords. We've perverted the notion of democracy into some sort of weird embrace where "the economy" (where the economy is whatever special interests weild influence today) is a priority above the public welfare.
If a slumlord, or a corrupt contractor profiting off of others misery (operators of "nonprofit" social services orgs, private prisons, etc) is happy, democracy has failed.
Poverty has ultimately nothing to do with opportunity, but those less unfortunate; literally, those without luck. Buffett would be the first to acknowledge that he's been lucky, and I would claim that while it's completely true that poverty has many sources, I would not agree that luck cannot be removed from the process. As such, poverty will always be with us.
I assume you actually mean that luck cannot be removed from the equation when you say "I would not agree that luck cannot be removed from the process."?
You may be onto something there, certainly resources assist with wealth creation, but there's very little that is a sure bet, and risk and reward in the financial sense are frequently correlated. If it is a given that one wishes to minimise the degree to which they are beholden to luck (reducing risk) they are simultaneously frequently taking the other side of that bargain too (reducing reward). And you end up with poor people working terribly bad reward jobs on wages that left to market forces might not even be enough to cover their cost of living at all, but are pushed up by minimum wage laws, and subsidised by state social welfare programs (put it this way, and it's actually the state that profits from the poverty of other people by trading subsistence living for political capital, a conclusion the guardian would likely be utterly horrified by)
People just trying to scrape by, keep a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food in their bodies are not prone to taking smart, calculated risks on their financial situation. In fact the example that springs to mind with the kinds of risks that these people take are actually really bad ones (lotteries, gambling in general, etc). They don't for example build a wealth portfolio, start a business, or even just invest in the skills necessary to get a better job that would yield a higher wage.
It seems that risk management education is a vanishingly rare thing in the group under discussion, and perhaps that's something that would go some way to addressing the role that you highlight when you refer to luck.
The author mentions a significant root cause in the first paragraph - de-industrialisation. Like so many other American cities, Milwaukee was relatively prosperous before the collapse of the manufacturing industry.
Improved regulation of the rental market would be a minor improvement at best. It's wishful thinking to imagine that poverty could be fixed quickly and at negligible cost to the taxpayer. The problems of poverty are systemic and so are the solutions - better welfare provision, better education, better support for job creation. If we wish to see an end to poverty, we must be willing to pay for it.