Part of the "culture" issue is low income housing. Housing projects ensure that children from dysfunctional families are surrounded by other dysfunctional families. There are no role models. There are no men of strong character and good habits. All the young children see are druggies, pimps and losers.
They sure do! But I grew up in NYC in the 50s and 60s, and then the housing projects were just replacement housing for people who had lived in tenements. You had to be married to get in and you had to be employed. The buildings weren't beautiful, but they were functional and safe.
Welfare recipients lived in what we called "welfare buildings" that were horrible. These were large buildings that the NYC welfare dept had rented out and which were inhabited mostly by blacks from the South. They had fires, people being thrown out of the windows, and ambulance calls at least three times a night.
I will never forget when the city declared that unmarried women with children could get apartments in the projects. This was under Lindsay, btw, after the Harlem riots and Lindsay bumped these people up to the top, over people who'd been on the list for years.
A coworker, who was black and lived in the projects (that is, black, married, employed and married to somebody who had been employed until his death a few years earlier) was very distressed because her daughter had fallen in with a bad crowd, gotten pregnant, and then came to see her mother and boasted that she could now get her own apartment. My co-worker said, "Liz, I just don't know what's going to happen now."
How right she was.