ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the effort at the macro level, and discusses nine widely held notions about the origins of low-income housing problems in large cities. Because none of the nine has ever been presented as a completely reasoned theory, the authors have chosen to refer to them as “images” of the problem. Although the images overlap here and there, each has a dominant organizing theme. The nine themes are: the filtering process, inner-city obsolescence, spatial concentration of low-income families, low income itself, problem families, greedy investors, exploitative system, racial discrimination, and the deteriorating social fabric of inner-city neighborhoods. The chapter describes each image, and also analyzes the special case of housing abandonment in an attempt to arrive at an image of the problem which accords with our own perception of reality. Since each of the nine images contains elements of both fact and fiction.
