"Cogently argued, fills an important gap in the literature, and is accessible to undergraduates." —Choice

"Dismantles the mythology surrounding pawnshops and check-cashing outlets, and demonstrates that they are no longer on the fringe of our financial system but integral to it."—San Francisco Bay Guardian

In today's world of electronic cash transfers, automated teller machines, and credit cards, the image of the musty, junk-laden pawnshop seems a relic of the past. But it is not. The 1980s witnessed a tremendous boom in pawnbroking. There are now more pawnshops thanever before in U.S. history, and they are found not only in large cities but in towns and suburbs throughout the nation. As John Caskey demonstrates in Fringe Banking, the increased public patronage of both pawnshops and commercial check-cashing outlets signals the growing number of American households now living on a cash-only basis, with no connection to any mainstream credit facilities or banking services.

Fringe Banking is the first comprehensive study of pawnshops and check-cashing outlets, profiling their operations, customers, and recent growth from family-owned shops to such successful outlet chains as Cash American and ACE America's Cash Express. It explains why, despite interest rates and fees substantially higher than those of banks, their use has so dramatically increased. According to Caskey, declining family earnings, changing family structures, a growing immigrant population, and lack of household budgeting skills has greatly reduced the demand for bank deposit services among millions of Americans. In addition, banks responded to 1980s regulatory changes by increasing fees on deposit accounts with small balances and closing branches in many poor urban areas.

These factors combined to leave many low- and moderate-income families without access to checking privileges, credit services, and bank loans. Pawnshops and check-cashing outlets provide such families with essential financial services thay cannot obtain elsewhere. Caskey notes that fringe banks, particularly check-cashing outlets, are also utilized by families who could participate in the formal banking system, but are willing to pay more for convenience and quick access to cash. Caskey argues that, contrary to their historical reputation as predators milking the poor and desperate, pawnshops and check-cashing outlets play a key financial role for disadvantaged groups. Citing the inconsistent and often unenforced state laws currently governing the industry, Fringe Banking challenges policy makers to design regulations that will allow fringe banks to remain profitable without exploiting the customers who depend on them.

JOHN P. CASKEY is associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College.

Perhaps the most alarming phenomenon in American cities has been the transformation of many neighborhoods into isolated ghettos where poverty is the norm and violent crime, drug use, out-of-wedlock births, and soaring school dropout rates are rampant. Public concern over these destitute areas has focused on their most vulnerable inhabitants—children and adolescents. How profoundly does neighborhood poverty endanger their well-being and development? Is the influence of neighborhood more powerful than that of the family? Neighborhood Poverty approaches these questions with an insightful and wide-ranging investigation into the effect of community poverty on children's physical health, cognitive and verbal abilities, educational attainment, and social adjustment.

This two-volume set offers the most current research and analysis from experts in the fields of child development, social psychology, sociology and economics. Drawing from national and city-based sources, Volume I reports the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between children and community. As the essays demonstrate, poverty entails a host of problems that affects the quality of educational, recreational, and child care services.Poor neighborhoods usually share other negative features—particularly racial segregation and a preponderance of single mother families—that may adversely affect children. Yet children are not equally susceptible to the pitfalls of deprived communities. Neighborhood has different effects depending on a child's age, race, and gender, while parenting techniques and a family's degree of community involvement also serve as mitigating factors.

Volume II incorporates empirical data on neighborhood poverty into discussions of policy and program development. The contributors point to promising community initiatives and suggest methods to strengthen neighborhood-based service programs for children. Several essays analyze the conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the measurement of neighborhood characteristics. These essays focus on the need to expand scientific insight into urban poverty by drawing on broader pools of ethnographic, epidemiological, and quantitative data. Volume II explores the possibilities for a richer and more well-rounded understanding of neighborhood and poverty issues.

To grasp the human cost of poverty, we must clearly understand how living in distressed neighborhoods impairs children's ability to function at every level. Neighborhood Poverty explores the multiple and complex paths between community, family, and childhood development. These two volumes provide and indispensable guide for social policy and demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary social science to probe complex social issues.

JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN is Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also director of the Center for Children and Families and founder of the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College.

GREG J. DUNCAN is professor of education and social policy and a faculty associate in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is also faculty affiliate of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.

J. LAWRENCE ABER is director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at the Columbia School of Public Health, Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS:Daniel Aaronson, Prudence Brown, Linda M. Burton, Thomas D. Cook, Claudia J. Coulton, Nancy Darling, Serdar M. Degirmencioglu, Frank M. Furstenberg Jr., Martha A. Gephart, Mary Elizabeth Hughes, Robin L. Jarrett, Sheila B. Kamerman, Tedd Jay Kochman, Jill E. Korbin, Tama Leventhal, Paul A. McDermott, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Townsand Price-Spratlen, Harold A. Richman, Robert J. Sampson,  Margaret Beale Spencer, Shobha C. Shagle, Laurence Steinberg.

Perhaps the most alarming phenomenon in American cities has been the transformation of many neighborhoods into isolated ghettos where poverty is the norm and violent crime, drug use, out-of-wedlock births, and soaring school dropout rates are rampant. Public concern over these destitute areas has focused on their most vulnerable inhabitants—children and adolescents. How profoundly does neighborhood poverty endanger their well-being and development? Is the influence of neighborhood more powerful than that of the family? Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children approaches these questions with an insightful and wide-ranging investigation into the effect of community poverty on children's physical health, cognitive and verbal abilities, educational attainment, and social adjustment.

This two-volume set offers the most current research and analysis from experts in the fields of child development, social psychology, sociology and economics. Drawing from national and city-based sources, Volume I reports the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between children and community. As the essays demonstrate, poverty entails a host of problems that affects the quality of educational, recreational, and child care services. Poor neighborhoods usually share other negative features—particularly racial segregation and a preponderance of single mother families—that may adversely affect children. Yet children are not equally susceptible to the pitfalls of deprived communities. Neighborhood has different effects depending on a child's age, race, and gender, while parenting techniques and a family's degree of community involvement also serve as mitigating factors.

Volume II incorporates empirical data on neighborhood poverty into discussions of policy and program development. The contributors point to promising community initiatives and suggest methods to strengthen neighborhood-based service programs for children. Several essays analyze the conceptual and methodological issues surrounding the measurement of neighborhood characteristics. These essays focus on the need to expand scientific insight into urban poverty by drawing on broader pools of ethnographic, epidemiological, and quantitative data. Volume II explores the possibilities for a richer and more well-rounded understanding of neighborhood and poverty issues.

To grasp the human cost of poverty, we must clearly understand how living in distressed neighborhoods impairs children's ability to function at every level. Neighborhood Poverty explores the multiple and complex paths between community, family, and childhood development. These two volumes provide and indispensible guide for social policy and demonstrate the power of interdisciplinary social science to probe complex social issues.

JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN is Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is also director of the Center for Children and Families and founder of the Adolescent Study Program at Teachers College.

GREG J. DUNCAN is professor of education and social policy and a faculty associate in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is also faculty affiliate of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.

J. LAWRENCE ABER is director of the National Center for Children in Poverty at the Columbia School of Public Health, Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Aaronson, LaRue Allen, Prudence Brown, Linda M. Burton, P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Elizabeth Clifford, Steven P. Cole, James P. Connell, Thomas D. Cook, Claudia J. Coulton, Warren E. Crichlow, Nancy Darling, Serdar M. Degirmencioglu, Frank M. Furstenberg Jr., Martha A. Gephart, Rachel A Gordon, Bonnie L. Halpern-Felsher, Mary Elizabeth Hughes, Robin L. Jarrett, Stephanie M. Jones, Sheila B. Kamerman, Pamela K. Klebanov, Tedd Jay Kochman, Jill E. Korbin, Jeffrey S. Lehman, Tama Leventhal, Paul A. McDermott, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, Townsand Price-Spratlen, Harold A. Richman, Robert J. Sampson, Edward Seidman, Shobha C. Shagle, Timothy M. Smeeding, Margaret Beale Spencer, Laurence Steinberg, Dena Phillips Swanson, Peter A. Usinger.

This book cuts through the powerful mythology surrounding Los Angeles to reveal the causes of inequality in a city that has weathered rapid population change, economic restructuring, and fractious ethnic relations. The sources of disadvantage and the means of getting ahead differ greatly among the city's myriad ethnic groups. The demand for unskilled labor is stronger here than in other cities, allowing Los Angeles's large population of immigrant workers with little education to find work in light manufacturing and low-paid service jobs.

A less beneficial result of this trend is the increased marginalization of the city's low-skilled black workers, who do not enjoy the extended ethnic networks of many of the new immigrant groups and who must contend with persistent negative racial stereotypes.

Patterns of residential segregation are also more diffuse in Los Angeles, with many once-black neighborhoods now split evenly between blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other minorities. Inequality in Los Angeles cannot be reduced to a simple black-white divide. Nonetheless, in this thoroughly multicultural city, race remains a crucial factor shaping economic fortunes.

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

MELVIN L. OLIVER is vice president of the Ford Foundation. He is responsible for overseeing the Asset Building and Community Development Program.

JAMES H. JOHNSON JR. is William Rand Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of Management, Sociology, and Public Policy and director of the  Urban Investment Strategies Center in the Kenan Institute in the Kenan-Flager Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ABEL VALENZUELA JR. is assistant professor of urban planning and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also associate director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, Institute for Social Science Research.

CONTRIBUTORS:  Elisa Jayne Bienenstock, Camille Zubrinksi Charles, Walter C. Farrell Jr.,  Jennifer L. Glanville,  Elizabeth Gonzalez,  David M. Grant,  Tarry Hum, Devon Johnson,  Michael I. Lichter,  Julie E. Press,  Michael A. Stoll, Susan A. Suh,  Jennifer A. Stoloff.  

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

This volume documents metropolitan Boston's metamorphosis from a casualty of manufacturing decline in the 1970s to a paragon of the high-tech and service industries in the 1990s. The city's rebound has been part of a wider regional renaissance, as new commercial centers have sprung up outside the city limits. A stream of immigrants have flowed into the area, redrawing the map of ethnic relations in the city. While Boston's vaunted mind-based economy rewards the highly educated, many unskilled workers have also found opportunities servicing the city's growing health and education industries.

Boston's renaissance remains uneven, and the authors identify a variety of handicaps (low education, unstable employment, single parenthood) that still hold minorities back. Nonetheless this book presents Boston as a hopeful example of how America's older cities can reinvent themselves in the wake of suburbanization and deindustrialization.

BARRY BLUESTONE is the Russell B. and Andr`ee B. Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy and director of the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

MARY HUFF STEVENSON is associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and senior fellow at its McCormack Institute of Public Affairs.

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality

The American dream of equal opportunity and social mobility still holds a powerful appeal for the many immigrants who arrive in this country each year. but if immigrant success stories symbolize the fulfillment of the American dream, the persistent inequality suffered by native-born African Americans demonstrates the dream's limits. Although the experience of blacks and immigrants in the United States are not directly comparable, their fates are connected in ways that are seldom recognized. Immigration and Opportunity brings together leading sociologists and demographers to present a systematic account of the many ways in which immigration affects the labor market experiences of native-born African Americans.

With the arrival of large numbers of nonwhite immigrants in recent decades, blacks now represent less than 50 percent of the U.S. minority population. Immigration and Opportunity reveals how immigration has transformed relations between minority populations in the United States, creating new forms of labor market competition between native and immigrant minorities. Recent immigrants have concentrated in a handful of port-of-entry cities, breaking up established patterns of residential segregation,and, in some cases, contributing to the migration of native blacks out of these cities. Immigrants have secured many of the occupational niches once dominated by blacks and now pass these jobs on through ethnic hiring networks that exclude natives. At the same time, many native-born blacks find jobs in the public sector, which is closed to those immigrants who lack U.S. citizenship.

While recent immigrants have unquestionably brought economic and cultural benefits to U.S. society, this volume makes it clear that the costs of increased immigration falls particularly heavily upon those native-born groups who are already disadvantaged. Even as large-scale immigration transforms the racial and ethnic make-up of U.S. society—forcing us to think about race and ethnicity in new ways—it demands that we pay renewed attention to the entrenched problems of racial disadvantage that still beset native-born African Americans.

FRANK D. BEAN is professor of sociology and director of the Immigration Policy Research Project at the University of California, Irvine.

STEPHANIE BELL-ROSE was formerly legal counsel and program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard D. Alba, Barry Edmonston, Walter C. Farrell Jr., Mark A. Fossett, William H. Frey, Jennifer E. Glick, Jomas H. Johnson, Karen D. Johnson-Webb, John R. Logan, Jeffrey S. Passel, Alejandro Portes, Michael J. Rosenfeld, Marta Tienda, Jennifer Van Hook, Roger Waldinger, Mary C. Water, Michael J. White, Franklin D. Wilson, Min Zhou.

During the 1970s, several striking population shifts attracted widespread attention and colorful journalistic labels. Urban gentrification, the rural renaissance, the rise of the Sunbelt—these phenomena signaled major reversals in long-term patterns of population distribution. In Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the United States, authors Frey and Speare place such reversals in context by examining a rich array of census data.

This comprehensive study describes new population distribution patterns, explores their consequences, and evaluates competing explanations of current trends. The authors also provide an in-depth look at the changing race, status, and household demographics of the nation's largest cities and discuss the broad societal forces precipitating such changes. Frey and Speare conclude that the 1970s represented a "transition decade" in the history of population distribution and that patterns now emerging do not suggest a return to the past.

With impressive scope and detail, this volume offers an unmatched picture of regional growth and decline across the United States.

WILLIAM H. FREY is faculty associate at the Population Studies Center, The University of Michigan.

ALDEN SPEARE, JR. is professor of sociology at Brown University.

A volume in the Population of the United States in the 1980s series.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Examines an alternative to the old patterns of living and working in the prevailing social system—the communal work place where work, recreation, and living space are brought together in a unified setting. The authors deal with a number of questions the communal work group faces, including the selection of projects, the choice of technologies and legal structure, and the means for determining economic viability. Past American and European communitarian movements are traced, as well as the nature and limitations of the new community experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

DAVID FRENCH is assistant professor of economics at Johnson State College, Vermont.

ELENA FRENCH is assistant professor of social sciences at Johnson State College, Vermont.

New York has eight million deeply personal and unique stories of pain and perseverance from September 11, 2001. But the toll of tragedy is greater than the anguish it inflicts on individuals—communities suffer as well. In Wounded City, editor Nancy Foner brings together an accomplished group of scholars to document how a broad range of communities—residential, occupational, ethnic, and civic—were affected and changed by the World Trade Center attacks.

Using survey data and in-depth ethnographies, the book offers sophisticated analysis and gives voice to the human experiences behind the summary statistics, revealing how the nature of these communities shaped their response to the disaster. Sociologists Philip Kasinitz, Gregory Smithsimon, and Binh Pok highlight the importance of physical space in the recovery process by comparing life after 9/11 in two neighborhoods close to ground zero—Tribeca, which is nestled close to the city’s downtown, and Battery Park City, which is geographically and structurally separated from other sections of the city. Melanie Hildebrandt looks at how social solidarity changed in a predominantly Irish, middle class community that was struck twice with tragedy: the loss of many residents on 9/11 and a deadly plane crash two months later. Jennifer Bryan shows that in the face of hostility and hate crimes, many Arab Muslims in Jersey City stressed their adherence to traditional Islam. Contributor Karen Seeley interviews psychotherapists who faced the challenge of trying to help patients deal with a tragedy that they themselves were profoundly affected by. Economist Daniel Beunza and sociologist David Stark paint a picture of organizational resilience as they detail how securities traders weathered successive crises after evacuating their downtown office and moving temporarily to New Jersey. Francesca Polletta and Lesley Wood look at a hopeful side of a horrible tragedy: civic involvement in town meetings and public deliberations to discuss what should be done to rebuild at ground zero and help New Yorkers create a better future in the footprints of disaster.

New Yorkers suffered tremendous losses on September 11, 2001: thousands of lives, billions of dollars, the symbols of their skyline, and their peace of mind. But not lost in the rubble of the World Trade Center were the residential, ethnic, occupational, and organizational communities that make up New York’s rich mosaic. Wounded City gives voice to some of those communities, showing how they dealt with unforeseen circumstances that created or deepened divisions, yet at the same brought them together in suffering and hope. It is a unique look at the aftermath of a devastating day and the vitality of a diverse city.

NANCY FONER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Buenza, Jennifer L. Bryan, Margaret M. Chin, Monisha Das Gupta, Kai Erikson, Sandra Garcia, Irwin Garfinkel, Melanie D. Hildebrandt, Philip Kasinitz, Neeraj Kaushal, William Kornblum, Steven Lang, Binh Pok, Francesca Polletta, Julia Rothenberg, Karen Seeley, Gregory Smithsimon, David Stark, Julien Teitler, Lesley Wood.

A September 11 Initiative Volume

Unskilled workers once flocked to Detroit, attracted by manufacturing jobs paying union wages, but the passing of Detroit's manufacturing heyday has left many of those workers stranded. Manufacturing continues to employ high-skilled workers, and new work can be found in suburban service jobs, but the urban plants that used to employ legions of unskilled men are a thing of the past.

The authors explain why white auto workers adjusted to these new conditions more easily than blacks. Taking advantage of better access to education and suburban home loans, white men migrated into skilled jobs on the city's outskirts, while blacks faced the twin barriers of higher skill demands and hostile suburban neighborhoods.

Some blacks have prospered despite this racial divide: a black elite has emerged, and the shift in the city toward municipal and service jobs has allowed black women to approach parity of earnings with white women. But Detroit remains polarized racially, economically, and geographically to a degree seen in few other American cities.

REYNOLDS FARLEY is Otis Dudley Duncan Collegiate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, and research scientist at the Population Studies Center of the Institute for Social Research

SHELDON DANZIGER is Henry J. Meyer Collegiate Professor of Social Work and Public Policy and director of the Center on Poverty Risk and Mental Health at the University of Michigan.

HARRY J. HOLZER is professor of economics at Michigan State University

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality