the minority population swelled within the urban environment, an increasing amount of middle and upper-middle class homeowners sold their homes and moved further and further away from the inner city.
Similarly, the modern urban environment has six factors, which are problematical for the population living in urban areas, as well as for governmental authorities at the local, state, and national levels. These problems include: unemployment, dependency, education, income level, crowded housing, and poverty.2
However, as more and more middle class families moved out of
1 William Julius Wilson, "Inner-city Dislocations, " Social Science and Modern Society 21 1 (November-December 1983), 80;
Mel Settle, "Must We Tear Them Down? How Urban Renewal Contributes to Homelessness," The Humanist 49 (May 1989): 9.
2 See Richard P. Nathan and Charles F. Adams, Jr. "Four
Perspectives on Urban Hardship," Political Science Quarterly 104 3 (Fall 1989): 484. Within this article, the authors analyze each of these factors as they relate to the inner city environment in America's most problem urban areas. Unemployment means the percent of the labor force living within a specific area that has no job; dependency includes persons younger than 18 or older than 64; education included persons over 25 that have less than a high-school education; income level is per capita income; crowded housing (... Continued...)
urban areas, the wealth of the inner city often evaporated with them. Thus, one of the primary goals of urban renewal is to re-establish the living environment within the inner city. This can be accomplished by renovating warehouses and other structures, turning them into office buildings, entertainment centers, or, as has become commonplace, turning them into high priced condominiums for a segment of the population in the upwardly mobile section.3
The problem becomes endemic when the minorities who were living in the inner city en...