A term introduced by Time magazine in 1977 which describes what some saw as a new class of poor people, not cursed simply with a lack of money, but with a whole host of social pathologies, from single parenthood, to drug addiction, to high rates of participation in crime, and low willingness to pursue legitimate work. The members of the “underclass” had allegedly fallen out of society’s traditional structures of work and family. They would, it was argued and feared, reproduce a class of dependent poor. The term is best written in quotation marks as it reveals as much about a cultural moment in the history of attitudes towards the poor and a community’s obligation to them as it does an actual group of people.

New, troublesome phenomena facing the United States and its cities gave rise to a series of books and endless articles about a “new” poverty. It is no accident, for example, that the term came out of an era of declining economic fortunes for the United States, as well as a wrenching transformation of cities and the larger economy which left many cities destitute in ways they had not seen before. With a rapidly declining industrial base, consequent growth of suburban area, a retrenchment of “Great Society” welfare and urban development goals, many urban areas had been left devoid of an industrial base.

Most gravely affected were “newer” immigrants, African Americans and Hispanics, in major urban areas. Poverty among these groups in urban centers did worsen as economic opportunities fled once-flourishing neighborhoods, ever more so as industry and new service-sector jobs moved out to suburbs and exurbs. A new American apartheid, as Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton called it, was taking over, not through southern segregation law, but by northern economic change and political decisions. The impact of economic desolation—“when work disappears” in William J. Wilson’s phrase—was a breakdown in a whole host of social structures and mores that maintain a community.

So, there were indeed new, troubling aspects of poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. But behind an apparently descriptive term of new problems, lay a century or more of attitudes and policies towards the poor and a more recent intense battle over poverty economic change and government’s role in social welfare. With the apparent failure of the “Great Society,” many conservative commentators looked for answers not in lack of opportunities or income but in a “culture of poverty.” This was in many ways old wine in new bottles—the notion of the “undeserving” and irredeemable poor from the nineteenth century recast for the late twentieth century. The term has been largely rejected by liberal scholars of American cities and social policy as at the very least useless—it offers no new insight into the new problems of poverty—and, at the worst, disastrous for the effort— once a real goal, now a starry-eyed dream—of eradicating poverty. For, by focusing on the behaviors of the poor and the “dysfunctional” life of poor, usually minority, communities, it turns attention away from structural changes in the economy which have created new, and in some ways, unprecedented problems of inequality.