In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, antisocial behavior, and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, religious, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished than other areas of the city. Versions of such restricted areas have been found across the world, each with their own names, classifications, and groupings of people.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
Spatial mismatch is the mismatch between where low-income households reside and suitable job opportunities. In its original formulation and in subsequent research, it has mostly been understood as a phenomenon affecting African-Americans, as a result of residential segregation, economic restructuring, and the suburbanization of employment.
The working poor are working people whose incomes fall below a given poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income. These are people who spend at least 27 weeks in a year working or looking for employment, but remain under the poverty threshold.
The underclass is the segment of the population that occupies the lowest possible position in a class hierarchy, below the core body of the working class.
Herbert J. Gans is a German-born American sociologist who taught at Columbia University from 1971 to 2007.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) is a progressive American think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Center's stated mission is to "conduct research and analysis to help shape public debates over proposed budget and tax policies and to help ensure that policymakers consider the needs of low-income families and individuals in these debates."
Myron James Magnet is an American journalist and historian. He was the editor of City Journal from 1994 to 2007. His latest book, Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution, was published in 2019 by Encounter Books.
Edward Soja uses the term fractal city to describe the "metropolarities" and the restructured social mosaic of today's urban landscape or "postmetropolis". In his book, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, he discusses how the contemporary American city has become far more complex than the familiar upper class vs. middle class or black vs. white models of society. It has become a fractal city of intensified inequalities and social polarization. The term "fractal" gives it the idea of having a fractured social geometry. This is a patterning of metropolarities, or an intensification of socio-economic inequalities, some of which Soja tries to pinpoint and discuss.
When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996) is a book by William Julius Wilson, Professor of Social Policy at Harvard. Wilson's argument is that the disappearance of work and the consequences of that disappearance for both social and cultural life are the central problems in the inner-city ghetto. He sought to discuss social disorganization without stigmatizing the poor. Wilson writes that chronic joblessness has deprived those in the inner city of skills necessary to obtain and keep jobs. Wilson's book uses evidence from large-scale scientific surveys in the ghetto and information culled from ethnographic interviews of ghetto residents in order to create a complete picture of the problems that face the residents.
Economic restructuring is used to indicate changes in the constituent parts of an economy in a very general sense. In the western world, it is usually used to refer to the phenomenon of urban areas shifting from a manufacturing to a service sector economic base. It has profound implications for productive capacities and competitiveness of cities and regions. This transformation has affected demographics including income distribution, employment, and social hierarchy; institutional arrangements including the growth of the corporate complex, specialized producer services, capital mobility, informal economy, nonstandard work, and public outlays; as well as geographic spacing including the rise of world cities, spatial mismatch, and metropolitan growth differentials.
In the United States, subsidized housing is administered by federal, state and local agencies to provide subsidized rental assistance for low-income households. Public housing is priced much below the market rate, allowing people to live in more convenient locations rather than move away from the city in search of lower rents. In most federally-funded rental assistance programs, the tenants' monthly rent is set at 30% of their household income. Now increasingly provided in a variety of settings and formats, originally public housing in the U.S. consisted primarily of one or more concentrated blocks of low-rise and/or high-rise apartment buildings. These complexes are operated by state and local housing authorities which are authorized and funded by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In 2020, there were one million public housing units. In 2022, about 5.2 million American households that received some form of federal rental assistance.
There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America by William Julius Wilson and Richard Taub was written in 2006 and is an investigation about racial, ethnic and class tensions in four Chicago neighborhoods. The four neighborhoods, Beltway, Dover, Archer Park, and Groveland are found on the South Side and West Side of Chicago. Beltway was chosen as being the white neighborhood, Dover as being the white neighborhood in transition, Archer Park as being the Latino neighborhood, and Groveland as being the African-American neighborhood.
Welfare dependency is the state in which a person or household is reliant on government welfare benefits for their income for a prolonged period of time, and without which they would not be able to meet the expenses of daily living. The United States Department of Health and Human Services defines welfare dependency as the proportion of all individuals in families which receive more than 50 percent of their total annual income from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and/or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. Typically viewed as a social problem, it has been the subject of major welfare reform efforts since the mid-20th century, primarily focused on trying to make recipients self-sufficient through paid work. While the term "welfare dependency" can be used pejoratively, for the purposes of this article it shall be used to indicate a particular situation of persistent poverty.
Concentrated poverty concerns the spatial distribution of socio-economic deprivation, specifically focusing on the density of poor populations. Within the United States, common usage of the term concentrated poverty is observed in the fields of policy and scholarship referencing areas of "extreme" or "high-poverty." These are defined by the US census as areas where "40 percent of the tract population [lives] below the federal poverty threshold." A large body of literature argues that areas of concentrated poverty place additional burdens on poor families residing within them, burdens beyond what these families' individual circumstances would dictate. Research also indicates that areas of concentrated poverty can have effects beyond the neighborhood in question, affecting surrounding neighborhoods not classified as "high-poverty" and subsequently limiting their overall economic potential and social cohesion. Concentrated poverty is a global phenomenon, with prominent examples world-wide. Despite differing definitions, contributing factors, and overall effects, global concentrated poverty retains its central theme of spatial density. Multiple programs have attempted to ameliorate concentrated poverty and its effects within the United States, with varying degrees of progress and to sometimes detrimental effect.
The definition of mixed-income housing is broad and encompasses many types of dwellings and neighborhoods. Following Brophy and Smith, the following will discuss “non-organic” examples of mixed-income housing, meaning “a deliberate effort to construct and/or own a multifamily development that has the mixing of income groups as a fundamental part of its financial and operating plans” A new, constructed mixed-income housing development includes diverse types of housing units, such as apartments, town homes, and/or single-family homes for people with a range of income levels. Mixed-income housing may include housing that is priced based on the dominant housing market with only a few units priced for lower-income residents, or it may not include any market-rate units and be built exclusively for low- and moderate-income residents. Calculating Area Median Income (AMI) and pricing units at certain percentages of AMI most often determine the income mix of a mixed-income housing development. Mixed-income housing is one of two primary mechanisms to eliminate neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, combat residential segregation, and avoid the building of public housing that offers 100% of its housing units to those living in poverty. Mixed-income housing is built through federal-, state-, and local-level efforts and through a combination of public-private-non-profit partnerships.
Katherine S. Newman is an American academic administrator who currently serves as the System Chancellor for Academic Programs, the Senior Vice President for Economic Development and the Torrey Little Professor of Sociology at UMass Amherst. Newman previously served as the interim Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston from July 1, 2018 to August 1, 2020. She previously served as the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of The University of Massachusetts system in the Office of the President in Boston, Provost of UMass Amherst, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, and Harvard University, and is an American author. Newman received a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for No Shame in My Game in 2000. In February 2020, UMass System President Marty Meehan appointed Newman as the System Chancellor of Academic Programs.
Mary Pattillo is an American professor and ethnographer of African American studies at Northwestern University. She is the Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and chair of the Department of Black Studies. As of 2016, she has served as director of undergraduate studies in African American studies and has been a faculty associate in Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research since 2004. She has formerly served as chair of Northwestern University's department of sociology.
John Forrest Kain was an American empirical economist and college professor. He is notable for first hypothesising spatial mismatch theory, whereby he argued that there are insufficient job opportunities in low-income household areas. Kain is also notable for his focus on transport economics, for his long career of teaching at Harvard University and the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as for founding the Texas Schools Project.
