ABSTRACT
Neighborhoods with more than 30 percent of the residents below the poverty level make up almost half of the urban neighborhoods in Ohio's central cities. Race and poverty are confounding factors in urban neighborhoods for the obvious reason that high-poverty neighborhoods tend to be largely nonwhite. Central-city neighborhoods are indeed highly diverse: Healthy neighborhoods coexist with deteriorating ones in all aspects of social and economic well-being. The economies of suburban neighborhoods are not merely extensions of the central-city neighborhoods they surround. Like some of the urban neighborhoods, the Ohio edge cities tended to be specialized in certain industries. Inertia is at work in industry location because many forces operate to keep the firm where it is once it is established at a location. The shift of the industrial structure of the US economy away from manufacturing, in which all Ohio central cities were specialized, has also inevitably contributed to the decline in the economies of central-city neighborhoods.
