ABSTRACT
The litany of inner-city ills has become all too well-known. Local newscasts regularly chronicle murders, drug raids, and other social catastrophes in poor urban neighborhoods. Journalists and commentators routinely use terms such as “war zones” and adjectives such as “bombed out” to describe such communities. Policy makers decry the abject failure of public housing high-rises to provide safe shelter for the country’s urban poor. All cite the neighborhoods’ high rates of poverty, crime, and unemployment; their large percentages of high school dropouts, teenage mothers, and single-parent families; and their dearth of mainstream commercial, retail, and financial institutions. Scholars such as Elijah Anderson have even identified a violent “code of the street” unique to youths in these urban ghettos.1
