Access to capital and financial services is crucial for healthy communities.  However, many impoverished individuals and neighborhoods are routinely ignored by mainstream financial institutions.  This neglect led to the creation of community development financial institutions (CDFIs), which provide low-income communities with financial services and act as a conduit to conventional financial organizations and capital markets. Edited by Julia Sass Rubin, Financing Low-Income Communities brings together leading experts in the field to assess what we know about the challenges of bringing financial services and capital to poor communities, map out future lines of research, and propose policy reforms to make these efforts more effective.

The contributors to Financing Low-Income Communities distill research on key topics related to community development finance. Daniel Schneider and Peter Tufano examine the obstacles that make saving and asset accumulation difficult for low-income households—such as the fact that tens of millions of low-income and minority adults don’t have a bank account—and consider solutions, like making it easier for low-wage workers to enroll in 401(K) plans. Jeanne Hogarth, Jane Kolodinksy, and Marianne Hilgert review evidence showing that community-based financial education programs can be effective in changing families’ saving and budgeting patterns.  Lisa Servon proposes strategies for addressing the challenges facing the microenterprise field in the United States.  Julia Sass Rubin discusses ways community loan and venture capital funds have adapted in response to the decreased availability of funding, and considers potential sources of new capital, such as state governments and public pension funds.  Marva Williams explores the evolution and recent performance of community development banks and credit unions.  Kathleen Engel and Patricia McCoy document the proliferation of predatory lenders, who market loans at onerous interest rates to financially vulnerable families and the devastating effects of such lending on communities—from increased crime to falling home values and lower tax revenues. Rachel Bratt reviews the policies and programs used to make rental and owned housing financially accessible.  Rob Hollister proposes a framework for evaluating the contributions of community development financial institutions.

Despite the many accomplishments of CDFIs over the last four decades, changing political and economic conditions make it imperative that they adapt in order to survive.  Financing Low-Income Communities charts out new directions for public and private organizations which aim to end the financial exclusion of marginalized neighborhoods.

JULIA SASS RUBIN is assistant professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Julia Sass Rubin, Rachel G. Bratt, Kathleen C. Engel, Marianne A. Hilgert, Jeanne M. Hogarth, Robinson Hollister, Jane Kolodinsky, Patricia A. McCoy, Daniel Schneider, Lisa Servon, Peter Tufano, and Marva E. Williams.

Shows what happens when a specific social policy is tried out on an experimental basis prior to being enacted into law. By providing a trial of a variety of negative income tax plans carried out over a three-year period in four communities, the New Jersey-Pennsylvania Income Maintenance Experiment was designed to observe whether income maintenance would lead to reduced work effort on the part of those who received subsidies. This book evaluates the final project reports on the experiment issued by Mathematica, Inc. and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin.

PETER H. ROSSI is professor of sociology and director of the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

KATHARINE C. LYALL is assistant professor of political economy and senior research associate at the Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, Johns Hopkins University.

A publication in the Continuities in Evaluation Research series.

The number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails more than quadrupled between 1975 and 2005, reaching the unprecedented level of over two million inmates today. Annual corrections spending now exceeds 64 billion dollars, and many of the social and economic burdens resulting from mass incarceration fall disproportionately on minority communities. Yet crime rates across the country have also dropped considerably during this time period. In Do Prisons Make Us Safer? leading experts systematically examine the complex repercussions of the massive surge in our nation’s prison system.

Do Prisons Make Us Safer? asks whether it makes sense to maintain such a large and costly prison system. The contributors expand the scope of previous analyses to include a number of underexplored dimensions, such as the fiscal impact on states, effects on children, and employment prospects for former inmates. Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll assess the reasons behind the explosion in incarceration rates and find that criminal behavior itself accounts for only a small fraction of the prison boom. Eighty-five percent of the trend can be attributed to “get tough on crime” policies that have increased both the likelihood of a prison sentence and the length of time served. Shawn Bushway shows that while prison time effectively deters and incapacitates criminals in the short term, long-term benefits such as overall crime reduction or individual rehabilitation are less clear cut. Amy Lerman conducts a novel investigation into the effects of imprisonment on criminal psychology and uncovers striking evidence that placement in a high security penitentiary leads to increased rates of violence and anger—particularly in the case of first time or minor offenders. Rucker Johnson documents the spill-over effects of parental incarceration—children who have had a parent serve prison time exhibit more behavioral problems than their peers. Policies to enhance the well-being of these children are essential to breaking a devastating cycle of poverty, unemployment, and crime. John Donohue’s economic calculations suggest that alternative social welfare policies such as education and employment programs for at-risk youth may lower crime just as effectively as prisons, but at a much lower human cost. The cost of hiring a new teacher is roughly equal to the cost of incarcerating an additional inmate.

The United States currently imprisons a greater proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Until now, however, we’ve lacked systematic and comprehensive data on how this prison boom has affected families, communities, and our nation as a whole. Do Prisons Make Us Safer? provides a highly nuanced and deeply engaging account of one of the most dramatic policy developments in recent U.S. history.

STEVEN RAPHAEL is professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

MICHAEL A. STOLL is professor and chair of public policy in the School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles.

CONTRIBUTORS: Shawn D. Bushway, John J. Donohue III, John W. Ellwood, Joshua Guetzkow, Harry J. Holzer, Rucker C. Johnson, Amy E. Lerman, Raymond Paternoster, Steven Raphael, Michael A. Stoll, David F. Weiman, and Christopher Weiss

The children of the past decade's influx of immigrants comprise a second generation far different than any this country has known before. Largely non-white and from the world's developing nations, these children struggle with complex problems of racial and ethnic relations in multicultural urban neighborhoods, attend troubled inner city schools, and face discriminatory labor markets and an economy that no longer provides the abundant manufacturing jobs that sustained previous generations of immigrants. As the contributors to The New Second Generation make clear, the future of these children is an open question that will be key to understanding the long-range consequences of current immigration.

The New Second Generation chronicles the lives of second generation youth in Miami, New York City, New Orleans, and Southern California. The contributors balance careful analysis with the voices of the youngsters themselves, focusing primarily on education, career expectations, language preference, ethnic pride, and the influence of their American-born peers. Demographic portraits by Leif Jensen and Yoshimi Chitose and by Charles Hirschman reveal that although most immigrant youths live at or below the official poverty line, this disadvantage is partially offset by the fact that their parents are typically married, self-employed, and off welfare. However, the children do not always follow the course set by their parents, and often challenge immigrant ethics with a desire to embrace American culture. Mary Waters examines how the tendency among West Indian teens to assume an American black identity links them to a legacy of racial discrimination. Although the decision to identify as American or as immigrant usually presages how well second generation children will perform in school, the formation of this self-image is a complex process. M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Richard Schauffler find marked differences among Hispanic groups, while Ruben G. Rumbaut explores the influence of individual and family characteristics among Asian, Latin, and Caribbean youths.

Nativists frequently raise concerns about the proliferation of a non-English speaking population heavily dependent on welfare for economic support. But Alejandro Portes and Richard Schauffler's historical analysis of language preferences among Miami's Hispanic youth reveals their unequivocal preference for English. Nor is immigrationan inevitable precursor to a swollen welfare state: Lisandro Perez and Min Zhou and Carl L. Bankston demonstrate the importance of extended families and ethnic community solidarity in improving school performance and providing increased labor opportunities.

As immigration continues to change the face of our nation's cities, we cannot ignore the crucial issue of how well the second generation youth will adapt. The New Second Generation provides valuable insight into issues that may spell the difference between regeneration and decay across urban America.

ALEJANDRO PORTES is the John Dewey Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Carl L. Bankston III, Yoshimi Chitose, Patricia Fernández Kelly, Charles Hirschman, Leif Jensen, Lisandro Perez, Alejandro Portes, Rubén G. Rumbaut, Richard Schauffler, Mary C. Waters, Min Zhou

A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

More than half a century after the first Jim Crow laws were dismantled, the majority of urban neighborhoods in the United States remain segregated by race. The degree of social and economic advantage or disadvantage that each community experiences—particularly its crime rate—is most often a reflection of which group is in the majority. As Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo note in Divergent Social Worlds, “Race, place, and crime are still inextricably linked in the minds of the public.” This book broadens the scope of single-city, black/white studies by using national data to compare local crime patterns in five racially distinct types of neighborhoods. Peterson and Krivo meticulously demonstrate how residential segregation creates and maintains inequality in neighborhood crime rates.

Based on the authors’ groundbreaking National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS), Divergent Social Worlds provides a more complete picture of the social conditions underlying neighborhood crime patterns than has ever before been drawn. The study includes economic, social, and local investment data for nearly nine thousand neighborhoods in eighty-seven cities, and the findings reveal a pattern across neighborhoods of racialized separation among unequal groups. Residential segregation reproduces existing privilege or disadvantage in neighborhoods—such as adequate or inadequate schools, political representation, and local business—increasing the potential for crime and instability in impoverished non-white areas yet providing few opportunities for residents to improve conditions or leave. And the numbers bear this out. Among urban residents, more than two-thirds of all whites, half of all African Americans, and one-third of Latinos live in segregated local neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of white neighborhoods have low poverty, but this is only true for one quarter of black, Latino, and minority areas. Of the five types of neighborhoods studied, African American communities experience violent crime on average at a rate five times that of their white counterparts, with violence rates for Latino, minority, and integrated neighborhoods falling between the two extremes.

Divergent Social Worlds lays to rest the popular misconception that persistently high crime rates in impoverished, non-white neighborhoods are merely the result of individual pathologies or, worse, inherent group criminality. Yet Peterson and Krivo also show that the reality of crime inequality in urban neighborhoods is no less alarming. Separate, the book emphasizes, is inherently unequal. Divergent Social Worlds lays the groundwork for closing the gap—and for next steps among organizers, policymakers, and future researchers.

RUTH D. PETERSON is Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, professor of sociology, and director of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University.

LAUREN J. KRIVO is professor of sociology and criminal justice at Rutgers University.

The Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

Despite today's booming economy, secure work and upward mobility remain out of reach for many central-city residents. Urban Inequality presents an authoritative new look at the racial and economic divisions that continue to beset our nation's cities. Drawing upon a landmark survey of employers and households in four U.S. metropolises, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, the study links both sides of the labor market, inquiring into the job requirements and hiring procedures of employers, as well as the skills, housing situation, and job search strategies of workers. Using this wealth of evidence, the authors discuss the merits of rival explanations of urban inequality. Do racial minorities lack the skills and education demanded by employers in today's global economy? Have the jobs best matched to the skills of inner-city workers moved to outlying suburbs? Or is inequality the result of racial discrimination in hiring, pay, and housing? Each of these explanations may provide part of the story, and the authors shed new light on the links between labor market disadvantage, residential segregation, and exclusionary racial attitudes.

In each of the four cities, old industries have declined and new commercial centers have sprung up outside the traditional city limits, while new immigrant groups have entered all levels of the labor market. Despite these transformations, longstanding hostilities and lines of segregation between racial and ethnic communities are still apparent in each city. This book reveals how the disadvantaged position of many minority workers is compounded by racial antipathies and stereotypes that count against them in their search for housing and jobs.

Until now, there has been little agreement on the sources of urban disadvantage and no convincing way of adjudicating between rival theories. Urban Inequality aims to advance our understanding of the causes of urban inequality as a first step toward ensuring that the nation's cities can prosper in the future without leaving their minority residents further behind.

ALICE O'CONNOR is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

CHRIS TILLY is University Professor of Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

LAWRENCE D. BOBO is professor of sociology and Afro-American studies at Harvard Universit

CONTRIBUTORS:  Irene Browne, Camille Zubrinsky Charles.  Sheldon Danziger,  Luis M. Falcon,  Reynolds Farley,  Roger B. Hammer,  Tom Hertz,  Harry J. Holzer,  Ivy Kennelly,  Joleen Kirschenman, James R. Kluegel,  Michael P. Massagli,  Edwin Melendez,  Philip Moss,  Julie E. Press, Leann M. Tigges.  Franklin D. Wilson.

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

The last quarter century has seen a broad, but qualified, belief in the efficacy of market organization slide into an unyielding dogma that the market, as unconstrained as possible, is the best way to govern virtually all economic activity. However, unrestricted markets can often lead to gross inequalities in access to important resources, the creation of monopolies, and other negative effects that require regulation or public subsidies to remedy. In The Limits of Market Organization, editor Richard Nelson and a group of economic experts take a more sophisticated look at the public/private debate, noting where markets are useful, where they can be effective only if augmented by non-market mechanisms, and where they are simply inappropriate.

The Limits of Market Organization examines the appropriateness of markets in four areas where support for privatization varies widely: human services, public utilities, science and technology, and activities where market involvement is altogether inappropriate. Richard Murnane makes the case that a social interest in providing equal access to high quality education means that for school voucher plans to be effective, substantial government oversight is necessary. Federal involvement in a transcontinental railroad system was initially applauded, but recent financial troubles at Amtrak have prompted many to call for privatization of the rails. Yet contributor Elliot Sclar argues that public subsidies are the only way to maintain this vital part of the American transportation infrastructure. While market principles can promote competition and foster innovation, applying them in certain areas can actually stifle progress. Nelson argues that aggressive patenting has hindered scientific research by restricting access to tools and processes that could be used to generate new findings. He suggests that some kind of exception to patent law should be made for scientists who seek to build off of patented findings and then put their research results into the public domain. In other spheres, market organization is altogether unsuitable. Legal expert Richard Briffault looks at one such example—the democratic political process—and profiles the successes and failures of campaign finance reform in preventing parties from buying political influence.

This important volume shows that market organization has its virtues, but also its drawbacks. Just as regulation can be over-applied, so too can market principles. The Limits of Market Organization encourages readers to think more discriminately about the march toward privatization, and to remember the importance of public institutions.

RICHARD R. NELSON is George Blumenthal Professor of International and Public Affairs, Business and Law, Emeritus, at Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Roberta Balstad, Richard Briffault, Lawrence D. Brown, Nicholas Economides, Kira Fabrizio, Kristine M. Gebbie, Sherry Gliead, John A. James, Sheila B. Kamerman, David C. Mowery, Richard J. Murnane, Dahlia K. Remler, Elliott D. Sclar, Timothy Simcoe, Jane Waldfogel, David F. Weiman.

Is the United States justified in seeing itself as a meritocracy, where stark inequalities in pay and employment reflect differences in skills, education,and effort? Or does racial discrimination still permeate the labor market, resulting in the systematic under hiring and underpaying of racial minorities, regardless of merit? Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s African Americans have lost ground to whites in the labor market, but this widening racial inequality is most often attributed to economic restructuring, not the racial attitudes of employers. It is argued that the educational gap between blacks and whites, though narrowing, carries greater penalties now that we are living in an era of global trade and technological change that favors highly educated workers and displaces the low-skilled.

Stories Employers Tell demonstrates that this conventional wisdom is incomplete. Racial discrimination is still a fundamental part of the explanation of labor market disadvantage. Drawing upon a wide-ranging survey of employers in Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, Moss and Tilly investigate the types of jobs employers offer, the skills required, and the recruitment, screening and hiring procedures used to fill them. The authors then follow up in greater depth on selected employers to explore the attitudes, motivations, and rationale underlying their hiring decisions, as well as decisions about where to locate a business.

Moss and Tilly show how an employer's perception of the merit or suitability of a candidate is often colored by racial stereotypes and culture-bound expectations. The rising demand for soft skills, such as communication skills and people skills, opens the door to discrimination that is rarely overt, or even conscious, but is nonetheless damaging to the prospects of minority candidates and particularly difficult to police. Some employers expressed a concern to race-match employees with the customers they are likely to be dealing with. As more jobs require direct interaction with the public, race has become increasingly important in determining labor market fortunes. Frequently, employers also take into account the racial make-up of neighborhoods when deciding where to locate their businesses.

Ultimately, it is the hiring decisions of employers that determine whether today's labor market reflects merit or prejudice. This book, the result of years of careful research, offers us a rare opportunity to view the issue of discrimination through the employers' eyes.

PHILIP MOSS is professor in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

CHRIS TILLY is University Professor of Regional Economics and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

The image of the "underclass," framed by persistent poverty, long-term joblessness, school dropout, teenage pregnancy, and drug use, has become synonymous with urban poverty. But does this image tell us enough about how the diverse minorities among the urban poor actually experience and cope with poverty? No, say the contributors to In the Barrios. Their portraits of eight Latino communities—in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Chicago, Albuquerque, Laredo, and Tucson—reveal a far more complex reality.

In the Barrios responds directly to current debates on the origins of the "underclass" and depicts the cultural, demographic, and historical forces that have shaped poor Latino communities. These neighborhoods share many hardships, yet they manifest no "typical" form of poverty. Instead, each group adapts its own cultural and social resources to the difficult economic circumstances of American urban life. The editors point to continued immigration as an issue of overriding importance in understanding urban Latino poverty. Newcomers to concentrated Latino areas build a local economy that provides affordable amenities and promotes ethnic institutional development. In many of these neighborhoods, a network of emotional as well as economic support extends across families and borders.

The first major assessment of inner-city Latino communities in the United States, In the Barrios will change the way we approach the current debate on urban poverty, immigration, and the underclass.

JOAN MOORE is professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

RAQUEL PINDERHUGHES is assistant professor of urban studies at San Francisco State University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, Phillip Gonzales, Guillermo J. Grenier, Nora Hamilton, James Loucky, Joan Moore, Felix M. Padilla, Raquel Pinderhughes, Nestor P. Rodriquez, Alex Stepick, Mercer Sullivan, Avelardo Valdez, Carlos G. Velez-Ibanez, James Diego Vigil.

Have the last two decades produced a New York composed of two separate and unequal cities? As the contributors to Dual City reveal, the complexity of inequality in New York defies simple distinctions between black and white, the Yuppies and the homeless. The city's changing economic structure has intersected with an increasingly diversified population, providing upward mobility for some groups while isolating others. As race, gender, ethnicity, and class become ever more critical components of the postindustrial city, the New York experience illuminates not just one great city, or indeed all large cities, but the forces affecting most of the globe.

"The authors constitute an impressive assemblage of seasoned scholars, representing a wide array of pertinent disciplines. Their product is a pioneering volume in the social sciences and urban studies...the twenty-page bibliography is a major research tool on its own." —Choice

JOHN H. MOLLENKOPF is associate professor of political science at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

MANUEL CASTELLS is professor of planning at the University of California, Berkeley and professor of sociology at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.

CONTRIBUTORS: Thomas Bailey, Charles Brecher, Steven Brint, Manuel Castells, Frank DeGiovanni, Matthew Drennan, Stephen Duncombe, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Norman Fainstein, Susan Fainstein, Ian Gordon, Michael Harloe, Richard Harris, Raymond Horton, Sarah Ludwig, Lorraine Minnite, John Mollenkopf, Mitchell Moss, Saskia Sassen, Edward Soja, Mercer Sullivan, Ida Susser, and Roger Waldinger