The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality

Over the past 40 years, poverty among the inhabitants of U.S. inner cities has remained stubbornly resistant to public policy prescriptions. Especially for African Americans and Latinos, the gap between their economic well-being and that of the mainstream has widened despite persistent and repeated efforts to address the problem. At the same time, a continuing stream of research has sought to explain urban poverty, with a wide variety of explanations put forward as the basis for policy. This paper reviews that research, organizing it according to eight major explanations or hypotheses: structural shifts in the economy, inadequate human capital, racial and gender discrimination, adverse cultural and behavioral factors, racial and income segregation, impacts of migration, lack of endogenous growth, and adverse consequences of public policy. We conclude that all of the explanations may be relevant to urban poverty but that their significance and the degree to which they are well supported varies substantially. It is now more than 12 years since the publication of William J. Wilson and Robert Aponte’s (1985) survey of urban poverty in the United States. That report still stands alone as an effort to produce “a state of the art review of research and theoretical writing on urban poverty” (Wilson and Aponte, 1985). However, in the intervening years, there has been much work on and even more debate about the nature and causes of poverty in U.S. inner cities. Much of the contribution, indeed, may be attributed to Wilson, who has sparked a new round of work in the field. At the same time, there has been a wave of interest in reform that is intended to respond to the seemingly intractable nature of urban poverty. This article surveys both the research on and the controversies over its validity and its policy implications. It is not comprehensive, but it does attempt to make sense of an enormous body of ideas and research that bear on the topic of inner-city poverty. It seeks to clarify the principal themes of urban poverty that seem to us to be part of current intellectual discourse. We do this by suggesting hypotheses about inner-city poverty that are part of the debates about its causes and what should be done.