Chicken or the egg? Do poor people have problems because they lack community spirit, or does their lack of community spirit (and self-reliance) make them poor?
Some of both, of course. The thing about a chicken/egg problem is that the classic question is "which came first?" but the inherent understanding is that it's a self-perpetuating cycle.
The New Deal/Great Society model to fight poverty substituted government programs, great in strength and resources but without a heart and soul, in place of church and community programs that were all heart but not sufficient to the task. Noble goals, good intentions, and even good results -- in the initial phases. But big bureaucracies don't adapt well to changing needs. So they continue to offer the same answers to new questions,
Public housing projects were a good solution then to the problems that existed then. People lived in shanties that had rats and flies, leaky roofs, garbage and sewage running along the streets and spreading disease. Challenge met and mastered.
But the projects were more like cattle pens than communities. The poor lived behind fences in isolated compounds -- they no longer counted the cops, shopkeepers, teachers and postmen who worked in the neighborhood among their neighbors. The approach should have changed at least twenty years ago, probably more like 30. But a big government bureaucracy is harder to steer than a train.
At least it's finally happening now. Cabrini Green, one of the great epic failures, is gone, blasted to the ground. Here in Atlanta, Techwood and East Lake Meadows -- an Orwellian name, if ever there was one, as there was nothing like a meadow about it -- is gone. Both neighborhoods are thriving.