What Neighborhood Poverty Studies can Learn from African American Studies (Report)

Since the late 1980s, there has been a resurgence of urban poverty research among sociologists, psychologists, urban planners, and economists. Many sociologists ascribe the renewed interest in poverty to several events in the 1980s: the widespread visibility of homelessness in American cities, the publication of William Julius Wilson's (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged, The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, and sociology's subsequent resurrection of social disorganization theory (i) (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000; Gephart & Brooks-Gunn, 1997; Furstenberg, 2001; Sampson, 2001; Brooks-Gunn, et al 1993; Massey, 2001). Wilson argued that "liberal" research on urban poverty had been curtailed for over a decade by the acrimony created by the debate over the controversial Moynihan Report, and he claimed that "liberals" were caught unaware when unemployment, rates of public assistance, and concentrated poverty all increased significantly during the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, Wilson maintained, "conservatives" had generated their own theories to explain the recent social changes that had occurred in urban areas, blaming liberal social policy for promoting "underclass," "welfare," or "ghetto" values and the subsequent perpetuation of what was popularly being termed the "urban underclass" (Murray, 1985; Auletta, 1983; Wilson, 1987; Peterson, 1991). These conservative arguments were gaining public attention, so, as a liberal, one of Wilson's goals was to reorient discussions about urban poverty and the "urban underclass" to the structural constraints created by the larger society, such as discrimination in housing and employment. Wilson argued that in the context of dramatic macroeconomic shifts such as de-industrialization, globalization, decreased government commitment to sustain inner city institutions and out-migrations of the African American middle class, poverty had become disproportionately concentrated in African American neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s, creating spatially isolated communities of extreme "ghetto" (ii) poverty, or neighborhoods where over 40% of the residents live below the poverty line.