The “Underclass” Revisited: A Social Problem in Decline

:In the early 1980s, widespread concern over the social conditions of inner-city neighborhoods gave rise to a literature on the “underclass.” A team of researchers led by Isabelle Sawhill, then of the Urban Institute, crafted a controversial operational definition of the underclass and found a rapid rise in the number of neighborhoods classifying as underclass in the 1970s and, to a lesser extent, in the 1980s ( Mincy and Wiener 1993 Mincy, Ronald B., and Susan J. Wiener. 1993. The underclass in the 1980s: Changing concepts, constant reality. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. [Google Scholar]; Ricketts and Mincy 1990 Ricketts, Erol R., and Ronald B. Mincy. 1990. Growth of the underclass: 1970 to 1980. The Journal of Human Resources 25: 137–45.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Ricketts and Sawhill 1988 Ricketts, Erol R., and Isabel V. Sawhill. 1988. Defining and measuring the underclass. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 7: 316–25.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The increasing prevalence of the underclass was linked to the increasing spatial concentration of poverty ( Wilson 1987 Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass and public policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). However, the concentration of poverty decreased in the 1990s ( Jargowsky 2003 Jargowsky, Paul A. 2003. Stunning progress, hidden problems: The dramatic decline of concentrated poverty in the 1990s. Living Cities Census Series, Center on Urban and Metropolitan Studies. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. [Google Scholar]; Kingsley and Pettit 2003 Kingsley, G. Thomas, and Kathryn L. S. Pettit. 2003. Concentrated poverty: A change in course. In Neighborhood change in urban America, No. 2. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. [Google Scholar]). This article reexamines the underclass measure in light of the change in concentrated poverty and finds a dramatic decline in the number of underclass neighborhoods in the 1990s.