Inner‐city concentrated poverty and neighborhood distress: 1970 to 1990

Abstract

Tract‐level data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses of population are used to identify poverty neighborhoods, extreme poverty neighborhoods, distressed neighborhoods, and severely distressed neighborhoods within the nation's 100 largest central cities. Changes in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of these neighborhoods are documented, including racial/ethnic composition; poverty population concentration; school dropout rates; and rates of joblessness, single‐parent households, and welfare receipt.

Results show that despite some encouraging individual city turnarounds in the Northeast (especially in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia), urban poverty concentration and neighborhood distress worsened nationwide between 1980 and 1990. The greatest deterioration occurred in midwestern cities, particularly in Detroit. Southern cities, whose neighborhoods and cities typically improved during the 1970s, slipped during the 1980s; conditions in western cities also deteriorated. Blacks fared worse than whites and Hispanics during the 1980s in terms of increased concentration of poor in poverty tracts and distressed urban neighborhoods.     

Barriers to third‐party advertising in Canadian elections

A survey of public interest group leaders suggests some reasons why few third parties have chosen to advertise in recent elections. It indicates that public interest groups abstain from election advertising not because of the strictures of the Canada Elections Act but for other reasons, notably cost and fear of losing charitable status or of jeopardizing their access to and influence with officials. While the significance of these findings is limited by the scale of the survey, the results do raise tantalizing questions that warrant further research.     

Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society

By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social group at all, then it consists not only: 1) in the argumentative contesting of a whole range of not-as-yet wholly formulated visions of future ways of ‘going on’, but also in: 2) the provision of the historically developed socio-ontological resources required for their realization. Civil society thus contains the ‘seeds’ of future possibilities. Taking activity in this realm seriously means that our current task in social studies, is not the scientific one of discoveringan already existing order, but that of enabling the reinstitution of what, traditionally, was the task of rhetoric: to explicate, in a non-eliminative form of competition involving rival formulations, the implications of different accounts of the nature of our social lives together.