San Antonio College Library

This book is designed to help readers navigate through the vast and rapidly growing literature on poverty in urban America. The major themes, topics, debates, and issues are examined through an analysis of eight basic questions about the nature and problem of urban poverty. After analyzing these issues, Jennings concludes with a brief overview of how public discussions related to poverty in the 1990s are similar to such debates in earlier periods....

"In No Shame in My Game, anthropologist Katherine Newman presents a view of inner-city poverty radically different from that commonly accepted. The all-too-prevalent picture we get of the poor today - in the media, in the political sphere, and in scholarly studies - is of alienated minorities living in big-city ghettos, lacking in values and family structure, criminally inclined, and permanently dependent on government handouts." "What Newman reveals,...

"The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. Peter Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer...

The author immersed himself in the teenage underworld of Clarendon Heights. The Hallway Hangers, one of the neighborhood cliques, appear as cynical self-destructive hoodlums. The other group, the Brothers, take the American Dream to heart and aspire to middle-class respectability. The twist is that the Hallway Hangers are mostly white; the Brothers are almost all black. Comparing the two groups, MacLeod provides a provocative account of how poverty...

Explores the geographical diversity of poverty, stressing differences across states, metropolitan areas and counties. Concludes that policy prescriptions should vary greatly across space.

"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink,...

"Thirty years ago we had riots in the city streets. Then-President Johnson convened the Kerner Commission to examine the reasons why, and it concluded that the U.S. was "moving towards two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal." Today, the city streets are populated more variously and suffering more quietly, but more people in U.S. cities are poorer now than ever before. As this book shows, U.S. cities are becoming poorhouses for blacks...