Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [137]
Beneath all this are more important changes. First, violent crime and gangs are no longer dominant features. Between 1999 and 2005, Jardim Angela’s homicide rate fell by 73.3 percent and continued to plummet to levels comparable to a South American middle-class neighborhood. The Bronx and Ninja gangs have by all accounts faded into irrelevance. While a larger statewide gang has taken control of the city’s entire cocaine trade, reducing gang rivalries, most informed observers believe the disappearance of gangs from this neighborhood is a direct result of economic development. Cell-phone theft and armed robbery are now the prevalent crimes, and the major cause of teenage mortality is motorcycle accidents. Second, the neighborhood is today tightly linked into the city, with bus services running through the favela to a nearby commuter-train link, as well as offices of numerous government agencies. Third, since 2003, the people here have legally owned their homes, thanks to a forward-looking São Paulo mayor who made land-titling a priority.† As a result, almost two-thirds have invested in improvements. Fourth, there are now the means to start and run a small business, and the neighborhood is packed with shops, department stores, credit agencies, and small workshops. People here remain poor, and there remains a large population of young people (mainly male high-school graduates) who are stuck in a netherworld of casual employment. But a notable and sustainable middle class is emerging within the favela, turning it into a much better neighborhood and improving the living conditions of even the poorest residents. The process of arrival, dramatically interrupted in the 1980s and ’90s, has returned.
It is worth examining Jardim Angela’s transformation closely, for it offers answers to a key question of our age: What does it take to make the journey from a rural shack to the center of middle-class urban life within a generation? Or, for that matter, even in two generations? This is, after all, the core function of the arrival city, the sole objective of all those hundreds of millions of journeys from village to city. It is a wonder, then, that we know so little about how this can be accomplished. It is clear, from our tour of the world’s arrival cities, that this transformation often does not take place within a generation and that grim and violent repercussions can take place when it doesn’t. Yet it should also be clear that rural migrants consider this transformation to be the norm. In fact, they expect it. In Jardim Angela, we can see what obstacles can block their path and what can be done to remove them.
In 1996, there did not seem to be any paths at all. Jardim Angela, built by soy farmers and sugar-cane planters to be a platform for their dreams, had turned into a deadly, isolated antechamber for their children. The second generation had no purchase in urban life and no connection to the village. They were culturally city-dwellers, with a standard of living and expectations far higher than those of their parents, but they were trapped in a world that treated them as no more than the unwanted offspring of villagers. Lost and without support, they consumed one another. “There wasn’t a day that would go by, when I walked around the parish, that I wouldn’t step across two or three bodies,” says Father Jaime Crowe, the favela’s priest, who found himself with the task of burying an entire generation. “To step over a body in front of a door with a newspaper thrown over it to have a drink—you’d think nothing of it. Children,