LoTc J. D. Wacquant and William Julius Wilson
Editors' Introduction
William Julius Wilson is one of the leading black sociologists and one of the most influential thinkers on iss of urban poverty, race, and social policy in America. His first major contribution to the national debate on status of African Americans in the U.S. was The Declining Significance of Race (University of Chicago Pn 1976) in which he argued that socioeconomic issues were superseding racial issues as the main probk confronting black urban America. He applied his ideas more specifically to the conditions of the urban bl poor with his second book, 77ie Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Univei of Chicago Press, 1987).
In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson argues that the black ghetto has become a much more d gerous, deprived and socially disorganized place across the course of the twentieth century. He bet: with a discussion of the problem of labeling; the term "underclass" like the phrase "culture of pover has been used by political conservatives since the 1980s to blame the victims of urban poverty for tl own plight. Wilson repudiates the arguments of political conservatives while challenging liberals to reest lish control of public discourse concerning the underclass. He analyzes the effect of structural econoi change and the suburbanization of the black middle class in concentrating the problems of the bl, poor in the inner cities. He asserts that the urban black poor suffer from a "tangle of pathologies" £ live in "social isolation" from the mainstream of social life in America. He also discusses the merits social policies of universalism versus targeted income-tested or race-based programs to address urban underclass.
In their co-written selection, Lo'i'c Wacquant and William Wilson reiterate and reformulate some the issues that Wilson initially addressed. They emphasize the dual importance of both class and rai dynamics in the exclusion of blacks in Chicago as a case study of national trends. The mass exodus jobs and working families from the inner city, coupled with the growth of neoliberal policies of gove ment privatization and reduction of public spending has triggered a process of "hyperghettoizatic concentrating blacks in a crisis of joblessness and extreme poverty. They draw attention also deindustrializaiion or structural shift in the economy, notably the decentralization of manufactur employment from the inner city to the suburbs, Sunbelt states, and offshore locations in developing natia
The decline of institutional structures in the ghetto, what Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged cal "social buffers," is described in this selection as the loss of the "pulpit and the press." The loss of black leadership (such as teachers, clergy, journalists, lawyers, and businessmen) into the suburbs f left the inner city bereft of stable working families and resources for upward social mobility. Wacqu and Wilson describe the loss of educational resources in the hyperghetto, a situation that is all the mi
"THE  COST  OF  RACIAL AND   CLASS   EXCLUSION
sta.rk because of the loss of manufacturing employment from the inner city. These factory jobs were often available for the previous generation without formal education, as work skills could often be acquired on-the-job. They also paid a living wage, unlike the service sector jobs that have replaced factory jobs, with the "runaway plant," and deindustrializaiion process in American cities. Contemporary residents of the hyperghetto are also poorly suited for employment in the new information and technology-based sectors of the postindustrial economy. John Kasarda has described this problem as "jobs-skills mismatch" in a variety of writings, including a chapter titled "Urban Industrial Transition and the Underclass," in William Wilson, editor, The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1993).
Wacquant and Wilson also consider the growing feminization of poverty in the hyperghetto, as poor households are increasingly headed by single-women. They note the continuing erosion of financial resources for ghetto households, and the decline in homeownership. They note that the households left in the hyperghetto are bereft of links to solidarity groups, networks, and organizations, what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "social capital" ("The Forms of Capital," in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). The political scientist Robert Putnam has recently received national attention for his writings on the general decline of social capital and community networks as a general process in postwar U.S. society {Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
William Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race was winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award. The Truly Disadvantaged was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best books of 1987, and it also received the Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems C. Wright Mills Award. When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) was chosen as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. He published The Bridge over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics in 1999 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press}.
William Julius Wilson received his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1996. He taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he became the director of the Center for the Study of Urban Inequality at the University of Chicago. In 1996, he moved to become the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. Wilson is a past president of the American Sociological Association. He was a MacArthur Prize fellow from 1987 to 1992 and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the American Philosophical Society. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of America's 25 Most Influential People, in 1998, he received the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the U.S.
LoTc Wacquant was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, working as a research assistant at the Urban Poverty and Family Structure Project, when he and Wilson began the collaboration that led to this selection. Further biographical background on Wacquant is provided in the introduction to his selection on "Urban Outcasts: Stigma and Division in the Black American Ghetto and the French Urban Periphery."
After a long eclipse, the ghetto has made a stunning comeback into the collective consciousness of America. Not since the riots of the hot summers of 1966-68 have the black poor received so much attention in academic, activist, and policymaking quarters alike. Persistent and rising poverty, espe-
cially among children, mounting social disruptions, the continuing degradation of public housing and public schools, concern over the eroding tax base of cities plagued by large ghettos and by the dilemmas of gentrification, the disillusions of liberals over welfare have all combined to put the black
LOIC J,   D.   WACQUANT AND  WILLIAM  JULIUS  '
inner-city poor back in the spotlight. Owing in large part to the pervasive and ascendant influence of conservative ideology in the United States, however, recent discussions of the plight of ghetto blacks have typically been cast in individualistic and moralistic terms. The poor are presented as a mere aggregation of personal cases, each with its own logic and self-contained causes. Severed from the struggles and structural changes in the society, economy, and polity that in fact determine them, inner-city dislocations are then portrayed as a self-imposed, self-sustaining phenomenon. This vision of poverty-has found perhaps its most vivid expression in the lurid descriptions of ghetto residents that have flourished in the pages of popular magazines and on televised programs devoted to the emerging underclass. Descriptions and explanations of the current predicament of inner-city blacks put the emphasis on individual attributes and the alleged grip of the so-called culture of poverty.
This chapter, in sharp contrast, draws attention to the specific features of the proximate social structure in which ghetto residents evolve and strive, against formidable odds, to survive and, whenever they can, escape its poverty and degradation. We provide this different perspective by profiling blacks who live in Chicago's inner city, contrasting the situation of those who dwell in low-poverty areas with residents of the city's ghetto neighborhoods. Beyond its sociographic focus, the central argument running through this article is that the interrelated set of phenomena captured by the term "underclass" is primarily social-structural and that the ghetto is experiencing a "crisis" not because a "welfare ethos" has mysteriously taken over its residents but because joblessness and economic exclusion, having reached dramatic proportions, have triggered a process of hyperghettoization.
Indeed, the urban black poor of today differ both from their counterparts of earlier years and from the white poor in that they are becoming increasingly concentrated in dilapidated territorial enclaves that epitomize acute social and economic marginalization.
This growing social and spatial concentration of poverty creates a formidable and unprecedented set of obstacles for ghetto blacks. As we shall see, the
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social structure of today's inner city has t radically altered by the mass exodus of jobs working families and by the rapid deteriora of housing, schools, businesses, recreational í ities, and other community organizations, fur exacerbated by government policies of industrial urban laissez-faire that have channeled a dis portionate share of federal, state, and munic resources to the more affluent. The economic social buffer provided by a stable black wor class and a visible, if small, black middle c that cushioned the impact of downswings in economy and tied ghetto residents to the worl work has all but disappeared. Moreover, the sc networks of parents, friends, and associates well as the nexus of local institutions, have j their resources for economic stability progressi depleted. In sum, today's ghetto residents fai closed opportunity structure.
DESNDUSTRIAIIZATION AND HYPERGHETTOIZATION
Social conditions in the ghettos of Northern mc polises have never been enviable, but today I are scaling new heights in deprivation, opr. sion, and hardship. The situation of Chicago's b inner city is emblematic of the social char that have sown despair and exclusion in tl communities. An unprecedented tangle of sc woes is gripping the black communities of city's South Side and West Side. These n enclaves have experienced rapid increases in number and percentage of poor families, extcn out-migration of working- and middle-class ho holds, stagnation - if not real regression -income, and record levels of unemployment.. The single largest force behind this increa social and economic marginalization of li numbers of inner-city blacks has been a se mutually reinforcing spatial and industrial chai in the country's urban political economy that t converged to undermine the material foundat of the traditional ghetto. Among these struct shifts are the decentralization of industrial pl£ which commenced at the time of World W but accelerated sharply after 1950, and the fl of manufacturing jobs  abroad,  to  the Sun
"THE  COST OF   RACIAL  AND   CLASS   EXCLUSION
average Chicagoan, with some 6 adults in 10 working. While this ratio has not changed citywide over the ensuing three decades, nowadays most residents of the Black Belt cannot find gainful employment and must resort to welfare, to participation in the second economy, or to illegal activities in order to survive.,..
As the metropolitan economy moved away from smokestack industries and expanded outside of Chicago, emptying the Black Belt of most of its manufacturing jobs and employed residents, the gap between the ghetto and the rest of the city, not to mention its suburbs, widened dramatically. By 1980, median family income on the South and West sides had dropped to around one-third and one-half of the city average, respectively, compared with two-thirds and near parity thirty years earlier. Meanwhile, some of the city's white bourgeois neighborhoods and upper-class suburbs had reached over twice the citywide figure. Thus in 1980, half of the families of Oakland had to make do with less than $5,500 a year, while half of the families of Highland Park incurred incomes in excess of $43,000.
A recent ethnographic account by Arne Duncan on changes in North Kenwood, one of the poorest black sections on the city's South Side, vividly encapsulates the accelerated physical and social decay of the ghetto and is worth quoting at some length:
tes or to the suburbs and exurbs at a time hen blacks were continuing to migrate en masse
Rustbelt central cities; the general deconcentra-of metropolitan economies and the turn ,ward service industries and occupations, pro-oted by the growing separation of banks and dustry; and the emergence of post-Taylorist, soiled flexible forms of organizations and gener-ized corporate attacks on unions - expressed j among other things, wage cutbacks and the iread of two-tier wage systems and labor con-acting - which has intensified job competition id triggered an explosion of low-pay, part-time ork. This means that even mild forms of racial scrimination - mild by historical standards - have bigger impact on those at the bottom of the merican class order. In the labor-surplus environ-ent of the 1970s, the weakness of unions and e retrenchment of civil rights enforcement jgravated the structuring of unskilled labor arkets along racial lines, marking large numbers ' inner-city blacks with the stamp of economic dundancy.
In 1954, Chicago was still near the height of i industrial power. Over 10,000 manufacturing itablishments operated within the city limits, nploying a total of 616,000, including nearly ilf a million production workers. By 1982, the imber of plants had been cut by half, providing
mere 277,000 jobs for fewer than 162,000 lie-collar employees - a loss of 63 percent, in larp contrast with the overall growth of manu-cturing employment in the country, which added most i million production jobs in the quarter cen-ry starting in 1958. This crumbling of the city's dustrial base was accompanied by substantial its in trade employment, with over 120,000 jobs st in retail and wholesale from 1963 to 1982. le mild growth of services - which created an Iditional 57,000 jobs during the same period, :cluding health, financial, and social services -itne nowhere near to compensating for this col-pse of Chicago's low-skilled employment pool. 2cause, traditionally, blacks have relied heavily i manufacturing and blue-collar employment for Gnomic sustenance, the upshot of these structural onomic changes for the inhabitants of the inner y has been a steep and accelerating rise in labor arket exclusion. In the 1950s, ghetto blades 'd roughly the same rate of employment as the
In the 1960's, 47th Street was still the social hub of the South Side black community. Sue's eyes light up when she describes how the street used to be filled with stores, theaters and nightclubs in which one could listen to jazz bands well into the evening. Sue remembers the street as "soulful." Today the street might be better characterized as soulless. Some stores, currency exchanges, bars and liquor stores continue to exist on 47th. Yet, as one walks down the street, one is struck more by the death of the street than by its life. Quite literally, the destruction of human life occurs frequently on 47th. In terms of physical structures, many stores are boarded up and abandoned. A few buildings have bars across the front and are closed to the public, but they are not empty. They are used, not so secretly, by people involved in illegal activities. Other stretches of the street are
LOIC J.   D.  WACQUANT AND  WILLIAM  JULIUS  WILSON
simply barren, empty lots. Whatever buildings once stood on the lots are long gone. Nothing
gets  built  on  47th___Over  the  years  one
apartment building after another has been condemned by the city and torn down. Today many blocks have the bombed-out look of Berlin after World War II. There are huge, barren areas of Kenwood, covered by weeds, bricks, and broken bottles.
society and provides basic minimal resources social mobility, if only within a truncated black c structure. And the social ills that have long b associated with segregated poverty - violent cri drugs, housing deterioration, family disrupt commercial blight, and educational failure - h reached qualitatively different proportions and h become articulated into a new configuration I endows each with a more deadly impact t before.
If the "organized," or institutional, ghettc forty years ago described so graphically by Dr and Cayton imposed an enormous cost on bla collectively, the "disorganized" ghetto, or hyj ghetto, of today carries an even larger price. ] now, not only are ghetto residents, as befi dependent on the will and decisions of out: forces that rule the field of power - the mosüy w dominant class, corporations, realtors, politici; and welfare agencies - they have no control c and are forced to rely on services and instituti that are massively inferior to those of the wider s ety. Today's ghetto inhabitants comprise aSn exclusively the most marginal and oppres sections of the black community. Having lost economic underpinnings and much of the texture of organizations and patterned activi that allowed previous generations of urban bla to sustain family, community, and collectivity e in the face of continued economic hardship unflinching racial subordination, the inner-now presents a picture of radical class and ra exclusion. It is to a sonographic assessment of latter that we now tum.
THE COST OF LIVING IN THE GHETTO
Let us contrast the social structure of ghi neighborhoods with that of low-poverty bl areas of the city of Chicago. For purposes of comparison, we have classified as low-povi neighborhoods all those tracts with rates poverty - as measured by the number of pers below the official poverty line between 20 . 30 percent as of the 1980 census. Given i the overall poverty rate among black families in city is about one-third, these low-poverty ai can be considered as roughly representative the average non-ghetto, non-middle-class, bl
Duncan reports how this disappearance of businesses and loss of housing have stimulated the influx of drugs and criminal activities to undermine the strong sense of solidarity that once permeated the community. With no activities or organizations left to bring them together or to represent them as a collectivity, with half the population gone in 15 years, the remaining residents, some of whom now refer to North Kenwood as the "Wild West," seem to be engaged in a perpetual bellum omnium contra omnes for sheer survival. One informant expresses this succinctly: '"It's gotten worse. They tore down all the buildings, deterioratin' the neighborhood. All your friends have to leave. They are just spreading out your mellahs [close friends]. It's not no neighborhood anymore.'" With the ever present threat of gentrification - much of the area is prime lake-front property that would bring in huge profits if it could be turned over to upper-class condominiums and apartment complexes to cater to the needs of the higher-income clientele of Hyde Park, which lies just to the south - the future of the community appears gloomy. One resident explains: " 'They want to put all the blades in the projects. They want to build buildings for the rich, and not us poor people. They are trying to move us all out. In four or five years we will all be gone.'"
Fundamental changes in the organization of America's advanced economy have thus unleashed irresistible centrifugal pressures that have broken down the previous structure of the ghetto and set off a process of hyperghettoization. By this, we mean that the ghetto has lost much of its organizational strength - the "pulpit and the press," for instance, have virtually collapsed as collective agencies - as it has become increasingly marginal economically; its activities are no longer structured around an internal and relatively autonomous social space that duplicates the institutional structure of the larger
"THE  COST  OF  RACIAL AND   CLASS   EXCLUSION"
neighborhood of Chicago. In point of fact, nearly aij - 97 percent - of the respondents in this category reside outside traditional ghetto areas. Extreme-poverty neighborhoods comprise tracts with at least 4° Percent of their residents in noveny in 1980. These tracts make up the historic heart of Chicago's black ghetto: over 82 percent of the respondents in this category inhabit the West and South sides of the city, in areas most of which have been ail black for half a century and more, and an additional 13 percent live in immediately adjacent tracts, Thus when we coun-terpose extreme-poverty areas with low-poverty areas, we are in effect comparing ghetto neighborhoods with other black areas, most of which are moderately poor, that are not part of Chicago's traditional Black Belt. Even though this comparison involves a truncated spectrum of types of neighborhoods, the contrasts it reveals between low-poverty and ghetto tracts are quite pronounced.
It should be noted that this distinction between low-poverty and ghetto neighborhoods is not merely analytical but captures differences that are clearly perceived by social agents themselves. First, the folk category of ghetto does, in Chicago, refer to the South Side and West Side, not just to any black area of the city; mundane usages of the term entail a social-historical and spatial referent rather than simply a racial dimension. Furthermore, blacks who live in extreme-poverty areas have a noticeably more negative opinion of their neighborhood. Only 16 percent rate it as a "good"' to "very good" place to live in, compared io 41 percent among inhabitants of low-poverty tracts; almost 1 in 4 find their neighborhood "bad or very bad" compared to fewer than 1 in 10 among the latter. In short, the contrast between ghetto and non-ghetto poor areas is one that is socially meaningful to their residents.
The black class structure in and out of the ghetto
The first major difference between low- and extreme-poverty areas has to do with their class structure. A sizable majority of blacks in low-povevty tracts are gainfully employed: two-thirds "°ld a job, including 11 percent with middle-class °ccupations and 55 percent with working-class jobs,
while one-third do not work. These proportions are exactly opposite in the ghetto, where fully 61 percent of adult residents do not work, one-third have working-class jobs and a mere 6 percent enjoy middle-class status. For those who reside in the urban core, then, being without a job is by far the most likely occurrence, while being employed is the exception. Controlling for gender does not affect this contrast, though it does reveal the greater economic vulnerability of women, who are twice as likely as men to be jobless. Men in both types of neighborhoods have a more favorable class mix resulting from their better rates of employment: 78 percent in low-poverty areas and 66 percent in the ghetto. If women are much less frequently employed - 42 percent in low-poverty areas and 69 percent in the ghetto do not work - they have comparable, that is, severely limited, overall access to middle-class status: in both types of neighborhood, only about 10 percent hold credentialed salaried positions or better.
These data are hardly surprising. They stand as a brutal reminder that joblessness and poverty are two sides of the same coin. The poorer the neighborhood, the more prevalent joblessness and the lower the class recruitment of its residents. But these results also reveal that the degree of economic exclusion observed in ghetto neighborhoods during the period of sluggish economic growth of the late 1970s is still very much with us nearly a decade later, in the midst of the most rapid expansion in recent American economic history.
As we would expect, there is a close association between class and educational credentials. Virtually every member of the middle class has at least graduated from high school; nearly two-thirds of working-class blacks have also completed secondary education; but less than half - 44 percent - of the jobless have a high school diploma or more. Looked at from another angle, 15 percent of our educated respondents - that is, high school graduates or better - have made it into the salaried middle class, half have become white-collar or blue-collar wage earners, and 36 percent are without a job. By comparison, those without a high school education are distributed as follows: 1.6 percent in the middle class, 37.9 percent in the working class, and a substantial majority of 60.5 percent in the jobless category. In other words, a high school degree is a conditio sine qua non for blacks
LOiC J.   D.  WACQUANT AND  WILLIAM  JULIUS   WILSON
for entering the world of work, let alone that of the middle class. Not finishing secondary education is synonymous with economic redundancy.
Ghetto residents are, on the whole, less educated than the inhabitants of other black neighborhoods. This results in part from their lower class composition but also from the much more modest academic background of the jobless: fewer than 4 in 10 jobless persons on the city's South Side and West Side have graduated from high school, compared to nearly 6 in 10 in low-poverty areas. It should be pointed out that education is one of the few areas in which women do not fare worse than men; females are as likely to hold a high school diploma as males in the ghetto - 50 percent - and more likely to do so in low-poverty areas -69 percent versus 62 percent.
Moreover, ghetto residents have lower class origins, if one judges from the economic assets of their family of orientation. Fewer than 4 ghetto dwellers in 10 come from a family that owned its home and 6 in 10 have parents who owned nothing, that is, no home, business, or land. In low-poverty areas, 55 percent of the inhabitants are from a home-owning family while only 40 percent had no assets at all a generation ago. Women, both in and out of the ghetto, are least likely to come from a family with a home or any other asset - 46 percent and 37 percent, respectively. This difference in class origins is also captured by differential rates of welfare receipt during childhood: the proportion of respondents whose parents were on public aid at some time when they were growing up is 30 percent in low-poverty tracts and 41 percent in the ghetto. Women in extreme-poverty areas are by far the most likely to come from a family with a welfare record.
Class, gender, and welfare trajectories in low- and extreme-poverty areas
If they are more likely to have been raised in a household that drew public assistance in the past, ghetto dwellers are also much more likely to have been or to be currently on welfare themselves. Differences in class, gender, and neighborhood cumulate at each juncture of the welfare trajectory to produce much higher levels of welfare attachments among the ghetto population.
In low-poverty areas, only one resident in f are currently on aid while almost half have ne personally received assistance. In the ghetto contrast, over half the residents are current weif recipients, and only one in five have never been aid. These differences are consistent with w we know from censuses and other studies: 1980, about half of the black population of m community areas on the South Side and West S was officially receiving public assistance, wl working- and middle-class black neighborhood! the far South Side, such as South Shore, Chath or Roseland, had rates of welfare receipt rang between one-fifth and one-fourth.
None of the middle-class respondents who ] in low-poverty tracts were on welfare at the ti they were interviewed, and only one in five had e been on aid in their lives. Among working-class i idents, a mere 7 percent were on welfare and j over one-half had never had any welfare experier This same relationship between class and welf receipt is found among residents of extrer poverty tracts, but with significantly higher rate; welfare receipt at all class levels: there, 12 perc of working-class residents are presently on aide 39 percent received welfare before; even a 1 middle-class blacks - 9 percent - are draw public assistance and only one-third of them h; never received any aid, instead of three-quart in low-poverty tracts. But it is among the jobl that the difference between low- and extrer poverty areas is the largest: fully 86 percent of thi in ghetto tracts are currently on welfare and o 7 percent have never had recourse to public aid, cc pared with 62 percent and 20 percent, respectivi among those who live outside the ghetto.
Neighborhood differences in patterns of welf receipt are robust across genders, with won exhibiting noticeably higher rates than men in b types of areas and at ail class levels. The hanc of black middle-class women who reside in ghetto are much more likely to admit to hav received aid in the past than their male couni parts: one-third versus one-tenth. Among world class respondents, levels of current welfare rece are similar for both sexes - 5.0 percent and percent, respectively - while levels of past rece again display the greater economic vulnerabilitj women: one in two received aid before as agai one  male  in  five.   This  gender  differential
THE   COST  OF  RACIAL  AND   CLASS   EXCLUSION"
mewhat attenuated in extreme-poverty areas h f the general prevalence of welfare receipt, with thirds of all jobless males and 9 in 10 jobless romen presently receiving public assistance.
The high incidence and persistence of joblessness and welfare in ghetto neighborhoods, greeting the paucity of viable options for stable empl0yment, take a heavy toll on those who are on aid by significantly depressing their expectations ríf finding a route to economic self-sufficiency. White a slim majority of welfare recipients living in low-poverty tracts expect to be self-supportive within a year and only a small minority anticipate receiving aid for longer than five years, in ghetto neighborhoods, by contrast, fewer than 1 in 3 Dublic-aid recipients expect to be welfare-free within a year and fully 1 in 5 anticipate needing assistance for more than five years. This difference of expectations increases among the jobless of both genders. For instance, unemployed women in the ghetto are twice as likely as unemployed women in low-poverty areas to think that they will remain on aid for more than five years and half as likely to anticipate getting off the rolls within a year.
Thus if the likelihood of being on welfare increases sharply as one crosses the line between the employed and the jobless, it remains that, at each level of the class structure, welfare receipt is notably more frequent in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, especially among the unemployed, and anions women.
Differences in economic and financial capital
A quick survey of the economic and financial assets of the residents of Chicago's poor black neighborhoods reveals the appalling degree of economic hardship, insecurity, and deprivation that they must confront day in and day out. The picture in low-poverty areas is grim; that in the ghetto is one of near-total destitution.
In 1986, the median family income for blacks nationally was pegged at $18,000, compared to S31,000 for white families. Black households in Chicago's low-poverty areas have roughly equivalent incomes, with 52 percent declaring over 320,000 annually. Those living in Chicago's
ghetto, by contrast, command but a fraction of this figure: half of all ghetto respondents live in households that dispose of less than $7500 annually, twice the rate among residents of low-poverty neighborhoods. Women assign their households to much lower income brackets in both areas, with fewer than 1 in 3 in low-poverty areas and 1 in 10 in extreme-poverty areas enjoying more than $25,000 annually. Even those who work report smaller incomes in the ghetto: the proportion of working-class and middle-class households falling under the $7500 mark on the South and West sides - 12.5 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively - is double that of other black neighborhoods, while fully one-half of jobless respondents in extreme-poverty tracts do not reach the $5000 line. It is not surprising that ghetto dwellers also less frequently report an improvement of the financial situation of their household, with women again in the least enviable position. This reflects sharp class differences: 42 percent of our middle-class respondents and 36 percent of working-class blacks register a financial amelioration as against 13 percent of the jobless.
Due to meager and irregular income, those financial and banking services that most members of the larger society take for granted are, to put it mildly, not of obvious access to the black poor. Barely one-third of the residents of low-poverty areas maintain a personal checking account; only one in nine manage to do so in the ghetto, where nearly three of every four persons report no financial asset whatsoever from a possible list of six and only 8 percent have at least three of those six assets. Here, again, class and neighborhood lines are sharply drawn: in low-poverty areas, 10 percent of the jobless and 48 percent of working-class blacks have a personal checking account compared to 3 percent and 37 percent, respectively, in the ghetto; the proportion for members of the middle class is similar - 63 percent - in both areas.
The American dream of owning one's home remains well out of reach for a large majority of our black respondents, especially those in the ghetto, where barely 1 person in 10 belong to a home-owning household, compared to over 4 in 10 in low-poverty areas, a difference that is just as pronounced within each gender. The considerably more modest dream of owning an automobile is likewise one that has yet to materialize for ghetto residents, of which only one-third live in households
LOIC J.   D.   WACQUANT AND  WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON
with a car that runs. Again, this is due to a cumulation of sharp class and neighborhood differences: 79 percent of middle-class respondents and 62 percent of working-class blades have an automobile in their household, contrasted with merely 28 percent of the jobless. But, in ghetto tracts, only 18 percent of the jobless have domestic access to a car - 34 percent for men and 13 percent for women.
The social consequences of such a paucity of income and assets as suffered by ghetto blacks cannot be overemphasized. For just as the lack of financial resources or possession of a home represents a critical handicap when one can only find low-paying and casual employment or when one loses one's job, in that it literally forces one to go on the welfare rolls, not owning a car severely curtails one's chances of competing for available jobs that are not located nearby or that are not readily accessible by public transportation.
Social capital and poverty concentration
Among the resources that individuals can draw upon to implement strategies of social mobility are those potentially provided by their lovers, Idn, and friends and by the contacts they develop within the formal associations to which they belong - in sum, the resources they have access to by virtue of being socially integrated into solidarity groups, networks, or organizations, what Bourdieu calls "social capital." Our data indicate that not only do residents of extreme-poverty areas have fewer social ties but also that they tend to have ties of lesser social worth, as measured by the social position of their partners, parents, siblings, and best friends, for instance. In short, they possess lower volumes of social capital.
Living in the ghetto means being more socially isolated: nearly half of the residents of extreme-poverty tracts have no current partner - defined here as a person they are married to, live with, or are dating steadily - and one in five admit to having no one who would qualify as a best friend, compared to 32 percent and 12 percent, respectively, in low-poverty areas. It also means that intact marriages are less frequent. Jobless men are much less likely than working males to have current partners in both types ofneighborhoods: 62 percent
in low-poverty neighborhoods  and 44 p,.-   ... in extreme-poverty areas. Black women h ■.. slightly better chance of having a partner i live in a low-poverty area, and this partner i more likely to have completed high schoc    ■-. to work steadily; for ghetto residence f    - .' affects the labor-market standing of the latte-   i ■ partners of women living in extreme-poverty ■ are less stably employed than those of f -respondents from low-poverty neighborhood    .. percent in extreme-poverty areas work reguk ■'-. compared to 84 percent in low-poverty area
Friends often play a crucial role in life i;    . ,-they provide emotional and material support   ■   -construct one's identity, and often open up c:: - ■-tunities that one would not have without tl- .-■.. particularly in the area of jobs. We have see   -. .■ ghetto residents are more likely than other -..--Chicagoans to have no close friend, if they n .   ■ best friend, furthermore, he or she is less lik."\ ■■; work, is less educated, and twice as likely lo aid. Because friendships tend to develop prir within genders and women have much f    v rates of economic exclusion, female responden much more likely than men to have a best )•   \ who does not work and who receives w ': ■ assistance. Both of these characteristics, in turn      : to be more prevalent among ghetto females.
Such  differences  in  social  capital  are evidenced  by   different  rates   and  patterr. organizational participation. While being pi.    ■. a formal organization, such as a block cli. ■ ■ ■ a community organization, a political pai .   . school-related association, or a sports, frat -    . or other social group, is a rare occurrence rule - with the notable exception of middle-blacks, two-thirds of whom belong to at   .   " one such group - it is more common for g- . ■ residents -  64  percent,  versus  50  percent in low-poverty tracts - especially females - 64 percent, versus 46 percent in low-poverty areas - tc belong to no organization. As for church membership, the small minority who profess to be, in Weber's   felicitous   expression,   "religiously  unmusical" is twice as large in the ghetto as outside: 12 percent versus 5 percent. For those with a religion, ghetto residence tends to depress church attendance slightly - 29 percent of ghetto inhabitants attend service at least once a week compared to 37 percent of respondents from low-poverty
"THE  COST  OF  RACIAL  AND  CLASS   EXCLUSION"
even though women tend to attend more
" »pulariy than men in both types of areas. Finally,
i ck women who inhabit the ghetto are also
' htlV 1£SS likely t0 know most of'their neignDors - n their counterparts from low-poverty areas. ... •   ai^ then, poverty concentration has the
(feet of devaluing the social capital of those who
Ve in its midst.
CONCLUSION: THE SOCIAL STRUCTURING OF GHETTO POVERTY
he extraordinary levels of economic hardship laguing Chicago's inner city in the 1970s have ot abated, and the ghetto seems to have gone naffected by the economic boom of the past five ears. If anything, conditions have continued to .vorsen. This points to the asymmetric causality etween the economy and ghetto poverty and j the urgent need to study the social and polit-:al structures that mediate their relationship, he significant differences we have uncovered etween low-poverty and extreme-poverty areas i Chicago are essentially a reflection of their Efferent class mix and of the prevalence of conomic exclusion in the ghetto.
Our conclusion, then, is that social analysts lust pay more attention to the extreme levels of :onomic deprivation and social marginalization as
uncovered in this article before they further entertain and spread so-called theories about the potency of a ghetto culture of poverty that has yet to receive rigorous empirical elaboration. Those who have been pushing moral-cultural or individualistic -behavioral explanations of the social dislocations that have swept through the inner city in recent years have created a fictitious normative divide between urban blacks that, no matter its reality -which has yet to be ascertained - cannot but pale when compared to the objective structural cleavage that separates ghetto residents from the larger society and to the collective material constraints that bear on them. It is the cumulative structural entrapment and forcible socioeconomic marginalization resulting from the historically evolving interplay of class, racial, and gender domination, together with sea changes in the organization of American capitalism and failed urban and social policies, not a "welfare ethos," that explain the plight of today's ghetto blades. Thus, if the concept of underclass is used, it must be a structural concept: it must denote a new sociospatial patterning of class and racial domination, recognizable by the unprecedented concentration of the most socially excluded and economically marginal members of the dominated racial and economic group. It should not be used as a label to designate a new breed of individuals molded freely by a mythical and all-powerful culture of poverty.