Christopher Jencks put social trends in poor neighborhoods in context by examining national trends from 1970 to the late 1980s. He noted that worsening poverty was not linked in a simple and direct way to other social problems and that sexual mores had changed across U.S. society, not just in the inner city.

Whereas wages and employment had declined for workers without higher education and single-parent families had become more common, welfare dependency had not increased since the early 1970s, and illiteracy, teenage motherhood, and violence had declined somewhat. Jencks urged researchers to distinguish the particularities of each social problem rather than to assume that they are all symptoms of a single, distinct, homogeneous underclass.

Other researchers examined the intersections of race, poverty, and place on a metropolitan or national scale. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton showed that continued racial segregation in metropolitan housing markets maintained neighborhoods that were majority black; Massey and Denton advocated integrated housing as a fundamental way to improve the life chances of African Americans. Paul A. Jargowsky investigated the distribution and spread of poor people in poor places nationwide from 1970 to 1990. Overall, he found that the number of poor people in high-poverty neighborhoods almost doubled from 1.9 to 3.7 million, largely because more places became poor. However, economic booms in the Southwest in the 1970s and in the Northwest in the 1980s sharply reduced concentrated poverty in those regions. Jargowsky concluded that neighborhood poverty resulted from metropolitan-wide processes, not from the character of the residents. He recommended metropolitan and national policies to increase productivity, lower inequality, and reduce segregation.

Despite research findings like these, public opinion still tended to fault deficient personal motivation and debilitating public assistance for the social ills represented by the idea of an underclass. In 1996 the Clinton administration passed the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, replacing Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. This legislation abolished federally guaranteed support to low-income families, set a 5- year lifetime limit on the receipt of such assistance, and mandated that mothers move into the paid labor force as quickly as possible. Consequently, many mothers entered the labor force, and the number of families receiving public assistance dropped dramatically, although many had only entered the ranks of the working poor. At the same time, public policy began to shift toward support of working families through the Earned Income Tax Credit. What began as a very small program in 1975 expanded, with bipartisan support, with each major tax bill in the 1990s and has become an important federal anti-poverty policy, although it does not address job creation or support for unemployed persons.

In 1992, partly in response to concerns about concentrated poverty, the Department of Housing and Urban Development began the HOPE VI Program, promoting the demolition of public housing for lowincome residents and the construction of some mixedincome housing. During the buoyant economy of the 1990s, many U.S. cities prospered, and the number of poor urban neighborhoods declined nationwide. Afew cities, such as Portland and Minneapolis-St. Paul, harnessed these market forces to link suburban and urban development and promote mixed-income development.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, public attention shifted to national security and immigration issues, although the term underclass was used in connection with the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005. In the future, the term may continue as a modern synonym for the "undeserving poor," just as it has in the past, or perhaps it may be dropped as an outmoded way of framing race, poverty, and urban issues.

References:

1) Gans, Herbert J. 1995. The War against the Poor: The Underclass and Antipoverty Policy. New York: Basic Books.

2) Jargowsky, Paul A. 1998. Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios and the American City. New York: Russell Sage.

3) Jencks, Christopher. 1993. Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty and the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

4) Katz, Michael B. 1989. The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. New York: Pantheon.

5) Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton. 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

6) Mead, Lawrence M. 2001. Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press.

7) Murray, Charles. 1983. Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980. New York: Basic Books.

8) Wilson, William Julius. 1980. The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

9) Wilson, William Julius. [1987] 1993. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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