The Urban Underclass and Public Policy
Since the late 1980s, a general mood of urgency has swelled around the growing concentration and persistence of poverty in inner-city America. Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners on the front lines noted with alarm that many of the problems seen in distressed urban communities seemed virtually intractable and non-responsive to conventional policy and program approaches. This course will be a critical introduction to some of the most pressing and contentious issues concerning the nation’s inner-cities today: the nature, origins, and persistence of ghetto poverty; racial residential segregation and affordable public housing; social organization, civic life, and political participation; crime and incarceration rates and prisoner re-entry; marriage and family structure; adolescent street culture and its impact on social mobility; women and poverty. In this course, we will also examine the issues of labor force participation and economic dislocation; entrepreneurship and inner-city revitalization; and the seminar makes use of the critically-acclaimed HBO series, The Wire.