ABSTRACT
At first glance it may seem there is little to learn from a history of policies with origins in the New Deal political order. After all, policymakers are operating in a much circumscribed environment, now that the era of big government is over. And poor communities are struggling against much steeper odds in a globalized economy that values mobility and flexibility more than place. But the plight of poor communities does have instructive historical continuities. Like the abandoned farm communities and industrial slums of an earlier era, the depressed rural manufacturing towns and jobless inner-city ghettoes on the postindustrial landscape represent the products of economic restructuring and industrial relocation, of racial and class segregation, and of policy decisions that have encouraged these trends. The historical
record also points to recurrent patterns within community development policy, which help explain its limitations in combating the underlying causes of decline.
