To this point it has been shown that the economic restructuring of the 1970’s and 1980’s, and other factors such as housing and labor market discrimination, have disproportionately impacted minority residents of the central city.  As a result, many of these individuals are unemployed, involuntarily live under poverty conditions (i.e low income), reside in public […]

What if the public assistance recipient can find and take full-time employment?  Does this guarantee that the individual can earn enough money to support his or her family at or above the poverty line if the individual remains employed?  The chances are that the individual will not be able to because most public assistance recipients […]

Another reason why public policy faces a tremendous battle in helping central city residents overcome the economic restructuring of the mid-20th century is a common perception held by many Americans.  This perception is known as the “culture of poverty” or “welfare-dependency” (Murray, 1984; Mead, 1986; 1992), and portrays welfare recipients (in actuality mainly AFDC recipients) […]

In addition to inner city blacks not having feasible transportation to suburban jobs nor the skills (i.e academic and workplace skills learned through formal training and education scenarios) to participate in the technologically advancing information based labor market, several other barriers are present which prevent them from obtaining jobs when they become available.  Kirschenman and […]

There is a long-standing debate in public policy over whether job development strategies should be targeted at people or place, or both.  In other words, should these strategies be designed to get people to where the jobs are or should jobs be located where people live? Most economic development strategies of the 1970’s and 1980’s […]

The U.S. economy, as a whole, has not performed well since the early 1960’s.  Sclar and Hook (1992) point out that since 1960, the rate of productivity increase in the U.S. has only grown at an average annualized rate of 1.21 percent, while countries like Japan, Italy, and Germany have experienced rates of between 2.87 […]

A common hypothesis in social and urban studies is that the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs in the central city, through a combination of reasons (i.e. institutional barriers such as housing and labor market discrimination in the suburbs), has led to an increase in unemployment of black male residents in the central city. A main […]

As a result of the restructuring discussed above, since the 1960’s, the U.S. economy has experienced a decline of traditional, high-wage, highly unionized manufacturing employment in most metropolitan areas and a dispersal of these jobs from the traditional central city to the suburbs (Phillips and Vidal 1986), and to counties just outside the MSA (Nelson, […]

Gone are the days of a robust U.S. economy boasting a predominance of low skill urban/central city jobs paying relatively high wages and the days when the U.S. economy was largely uninfluenced and insulated from foreign labor markets and product competition (Peterson and Vroman 1992). Barkley and Hinschberger (1992) show that American manufacturing is shifting […]

A. Overview The economic decline of older, northeast and Midwest U.S. central cities that occurred in the 1970’s and 1980’s can be attributed to two principal causes. First, many manufacturing jobs were lost to international locations, in part, because labor in foreign locations was cheaper. Second, massive developments in production technology, telecommunications, and the ascendance […]