ghetto

avoid using this casually, pseudogenerically, or metaphorically. Coined in the 16th century to describe the part of Venice to which Jews were confined, "ghetto" today carries such implications as crime, dilapidation, persecution, poverty, and "otherness"; it's also an idiomatic way of dismissing something as cheap or trashy. Because the modern "ghetto" is not only poor but disproportionately African-American (twice as many African Americans as whites live in high-poverty neighborhoods), it has come to sound like an indictment of a people as well as of a place (Kelefa Sanneh, "There Goes the Neighborhood" The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016). Replace the term with specific geographic descriptors or with: neighborhood, community, area, quarter, section of town/the city, district. (On hip-hop records, "ghetto" has largely given way to the warmer, more flexible "hood," which sounds less like a condition and more like a community.)