My perspective: I moved to the States from an Eastern European country in the early 90's. We lived in a public housing project for about two years, before my pa

My perspective: I moved to the States from an Eastern European country in the early 90's. We lived in a public housing project for about two years, before my parents saved enough money to move to the suburbs. What I remember: there was constant fighting, drug dealing, and public alcohol consumption; our apartment was broken into twice, my father was mugged once; there was trash and filth everywhere and people blasted music well into the night; very few people, sans my parents and other immigrants like them, had actual wage-paying jobs. There was just a general and very palpable feeling of social and moral decay. The behaviors that I witnessed, that my parents witnessed, cannot be explained economically, because the immigrant families that lived there (Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, and some Russians) simply didn't exhibit these same "defective characteristics" or behaviors, even though we were just as poor (and learning a new language) - it was almost exclusively from the native population that had lived there before we arrived. This indicates that the problem is either cultural, or something else. How do you fix the culture? That I don't know.