Last summer I biked with some friends from Amsterdam to Stockholm, about 1000 miles, just about the same distance I biked this summer. On the way we passed through the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. There were some pretty noticeable differences between there and here.

One of the most obvious differences was that there were a lot more bike trails and bike routes in northern Europe, and particularly in the Netherlands and Denmark, which are real havens for cyclists. It was rare that we had to share the road with much traffic. 

A more striking difference was the apparent lack of poverty-stricken areas in northern Europe. When bike touring you go through lots of places pretty slowly, you see a lot. Over the course of a few weeks you stop in a couple dozen of towns or cities. Yet in the countries we cycled in last summer, we simply didn’t see any large urban ghettos, or even any small ones for that matter. This was in real contrast to what I saw this summer in my ride up the east coast of the U.S.

In Richmond, VA, Baltimore, MD, Washington, DC, Wilmington, DE, Trenton, NJ, I rode through large, impoverished urban ghettos, half the housing boarded-up, and with businesses few and far between.

Most of these areas were African-American or Latino. This wasn’t just coincidental to where I traveled. According to the US. census of 2010, about 15% of white children live in poverty, while about 38% of Black children do, and about 34% of Latino kids. That’s a lot of children living in poverty. And I kept thinking as I was spent hours riding through miles and miles of impoverished, broken-down urban areas, why didn’t I see this in Europe? Could we have by accident unwittingly avoided all those areas there, or have they made societal decisions that has eliminated that kind of deep, broad poverty?

I must admit I haven’t done any extensive research on this topic, but from what I have read and what I have seen, I have come to the conclusion that maintaining an underclass is a societal decision, not a societal imperative. If we aren’t willing to spend the time, effort, and money to address the problems of entrenched poverty in our country, if we are willing to tolerate the perpetuation of an underclass, then that presence will continue to bedevil our society. But I don’t think it has to be that way. There is clear evidence that societies can enact policies that minimize poverty and we can choose, if we want to, to do that. I can’t understand why we aren’t willing to.