ABSTRACT
Much of the literature on poverty focuses on federal level initiatives as a response to urban poverty, seeming to ignore local level political processes. Researchers have tended to accept Peterson’s [1] contention that cities will not redistribute their own resources and that actual redistribution, utilizing monies from taxes from upper income groups to support initiatives that benefit lower income groups, can only occur with federal assistance [2, 3]. As a result, scarce attention has been given to policy efforts that utilize local resources that are intended to address urban poverty. A few researchers, mainly urban planners, suggested that it is possible to address poverty at the local level but offered little substantiation of what could be done or what was done [4-7].
