City Jobs and Residents on a Collision Course: The Urban Underclass Dilemma

As U.S. cities have transformed industrially from centers of goods processing to centers of information processing, the demand for poorly educated labor has declined markedly and the demand for labor with higher education has increased substantially. Urban blacks have been caught in this web of change. Despite improvements in their overall educational attainment, most still lack sufficient schooling to gain access to new urban growth industries which typically require education beyond high school. Whereas jobs requiring a high school degree or less have been rapidly increasing in the suburbs, poorly educated blacks remain residentially constrained in inner-city housing. These conditions, along with other economic, demographic, and social factors contributing to the rise of a residential subgroup known as the urban underclass, are discussed. Lessons to be learned from the relative economic success of recent Asian immigrants to America's transforming cities are considered. Strategies are then suggested to rekindle the social and spatial mobility of the black urban underclass.