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And inner-city neighborhoods in the 1990s continued to house a disproportionate share of the nation’s (overwhelmingly minority) poor and unemployed and to suffer from a disproportionate share of social ills like drug abuse and crime. S. cities in race-neutral terms is to tell only half, or less than half, the story of what has happened to our urban centers. Suburbanization and the ensuing balkanization of our metropolitan areas had and continues to have pronounced racial overtones. A disproportionate number of the families leaving the cities at the height of the postwar exodus were of European descent.

No doubt this reaction was at least partially rooted in suburbia’s culture of privatism and anti-urbanism. And no doubt it stemmed in part from perfectly understandable concerns about the real and sometimes brutal criminality that often plagues oppressed urban communities. However, I contend that the panic over the city was neither a simple reXex of the suburban mentality nor a realistic response to a genuine threat; rather, it was created, fueled, and organized by a right-wing discourse on the “urban crisis” that supplied an ideological framework and a set of ideologically laden concepts for interpreting conditions in the inner city, one which both ampliWed suburban fears and gave them a decidedly reactionary spin.

Historically, poverty in America has been more of a rural phenomenon than an urban one. 2 percent (see Table 5). By 1979, the poverty rate in the cities had risen to more than double that in the suburbs and has been roughly twice the suburban rate ever since (see Table 5). The situation has been particularly dire in declining industrial centers like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. S. ). One study after another attests to the fact that the nation’s poor population is now disproportionately concentrated in the urban core.