ABSTRACT
National problems have a way of coming home to local roosts, as many urban mayors have discovered. The national unemployment rate is an abstraction, the concrete manifestations of which are persons without jobs and factory layoffs in specific places. The extent and the quality of local social problems may be viewed as being made up of two parts: a national component, determined by society-wide trends, and a local component, determined by the special characteristics of the locality in question. The amelioration of social problems which have very large national components has to proceed on different bases than do problems which are more local than national. For heuristic purposes, it is useful to consider two alternative models as representing processes in the formation of grievances. A frequently voiced complaint of black leaders is that the retail merchants who are located in the ghetto and cater to residents offer goods of a lower quality and/or at higher prices.
