I live in a racially homogeneous (Euro-American), neoliberal, resolutely secular, generally well-off small city in Massachusetts. I think it's fair to call the

I live in a racially homogeneous (Euro-American), neoliberal, resolutely secular, generally well-off small city in Massachusetts. I think it's fair to call the city's culture a post-Calvinist post-Christian monoculture of striving upper middle class white people. Most of our kiddos have two married parents. The majority can expect middle class economic success in their lives. I volunteer in a drop-in center for kiddos in the public housing project for families, where our Euro upper middle class monoculture isn't visible. People come from other parts of MA to live in our public housing project for all kinds of reasons. Many households contain just one parent. Many are disfunctional. Many kids don't have enough structure in their home lives to get their schoolwork done. Lots of the poverty is multigenerational. The purpose of our drop-in center is to try to give these kiddos a vision of what it would be like to get out of housing -- to be socially mobile. Statistically, I suppose the phrase "get out of housing" means "move from the bottom quintile to some other stratum." But "get out of housing" is more tangible. And it's very difficult in my city. Why? Because we antipoverty activists get a lot of positive liberal lip-service but not much tangible support from the majority. Most of the kids in town are insanely busy -- music, dance, rock-climbing gym, sports. But, the kids in housing have very little to do; they don't feel like they fit in. It would be GREAT to have a bishop or two cracking the whip and saying, "Look, suck it up. Welcome these neighbors into your lives, and treat them like neighbors." "You're going to Cambridge to check out Harvard and MIT? Take a friend along." etc. We have some small victories: a few families a year stabilize, get jobs, and move out. But we have some defeats too. It's all about keeping at it. But to me the metaphorical grass in SLC sounds pretty green from this article.