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Introduction Few aspects of life are as important as the places where we live. To a considerable degree they determine the resources we have available to educate and socialize our children, to shelter our families and keep them secure, and to find employment within a reasonable distance from our homes. For the first half of the twentieth century America’s largest industrial cities affirmed through their growth the reputation that they offered the richest share of those opportunities. Generations of immigrants flowed to these areas and formed attachments to them. Changes in the second half of the century radically altered the allocation of local amenities, however, and fully tested those attachments. The flight of human and monetary capital , from city to suburb and from the industrial Northeast and Middle West to the South and West, marked a considerable shift in fortunes. For those arriving too late to capitalize on urban material resources, most notably the African Americans who migrated to take advantage of new opportunities during and after World War II, the industrial city became a hollow prize. As decline set in, the legacy for those unable or unwilling to leave the city for new opportunities was deteriorating homes, shrinking employment opportunities , and inferior services. To be sure, the nation did not accept such changes passively, at least not initially. In the early s, private foundations as well as some government agencies began to grapple with the ill effects of rising urban unemployment and associated antisocial behavior, especially among juveniles who found it difficult to secure decent entry-level jobs. These early efforts laid the foundation for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. As bold as this effort was in confronting urban poverty in particular, it had neither enough time nor enough money to achieve its lofty goals.1 Instead, rising incidents of civil disorder brought to the fore a widely acknowledged ‘‘urban crisis.’’ The body named to address its causes, the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission for its chair, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner) concluded starkly in its  report, ‘‘The nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal. . . . Discrimina-  Introduction tion and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.’’2 A generation later, with the advent of a new century, no such crisis generates national attention. If the War on Poverty failed, as many supporters acknowledge, civil rights legislation passed in the aftermath of s disorders , including measures designed to eliminate housing discrimination and open employment opportunities through affirmative action, appears to have improved the overall situation of African Americans. A growing number of critics have even begun to tout the recovery of America’s most beleaguered cities.3 Such optimistic pronouncements are difficult to sustain, however. The most comprehensive assessment of metropolitan social patterns , Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s aptly titled  study, American Apartheid, concludes every bit as pessimistically as the Kerner Commission , ‘‘No group in the history of the United States has ever experienced the sustained high level of residential segregation that has been imposed on blacks in large American cities for the past fifty years.’’4 A decade later, as the nation reviewed the progress of desegregation that resulted from the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, the assessment was equally bleak. ‘‘Racial segregation is still pervasive, and class segregation seems to be an accepted norm,’’ writes Georgetown Law professor Sheryll Cashin. ‘‘Choosing a neighborhood that separates oneself and one’s family from ‘worse elements farther down the economic scale’ has become the critical gateway to upward mobility.’’5 A close look at even the most highly regarded ‘‘comeback cities’’—Baltimore, Cleveland, and Chicago, for instance —reveals a striking unevenness in patterns of investment and opportunities for residents. While the number of cities succumbing to extreme fiscal distress was small in the new century—Pittsburgh and Buffalo being the most prominent—a host of once vital areas struggle even to approach a self-sustaining condition. Typically these were once important industrial centers of now highly suburbanized states: Detroit and Flint, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; Dayton, Youngstown, and Cleveland, Ohio; Holyoke, Lawrence , and Lowell, Massachusetts; Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, Connecticut; Chicago and East St. Louis, Illinois; and Newark, Patterson, Trenton, and Camden, New Jersey, to name a few. In  urban commentator and former mayor of Albuquerque David Rusk described these cities as ‘‘past the point of no return.’’ For Rusk...

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