This unique and inexpensive book provides a demographic and economic history of urban America over the last 65 years. The growth and decline of most northern cities is contrasted with the steady growth of western and southern cities. Various urban government policies are explored, including federal, state, and local policies. There is a chapter focusing on Detroit and its rapid decline toward bankruptcy and its recent strategies to slow recovery. The final two chapters speculate on what's next for urban America and gives suggestions for stimulating growth.

From their experience in nonprofit operations and their understanding of the realities of urban politics, the editors of this wide-ranging volume and their contributors dig into issues seldom explored in the literature. They study the role of nonprofits in local governing coalitions, the potential of nonprofits to replace social welfare programs, their efforts to restructure key elements of the local political process, and the unanticipated internal impacts of the changing roles of nonprofit organizations in the urban community. The result is a compelling argument that to understand life in contemporary American cities, we must take into account the expanding role of nonprofit organizations, their response to increased service demands, and their participation in common efforts to direct policy choices. Hula, Jackson-Elmoore, and their panel of scholars, researchers, and close observers of urban policymaking focus on the delivery of social services to illustrate the complex and important set of roles that nonprofits have assumed. As social programs are cut at all levels of government, it is often believed that nonprofits can and should take up the slack and restore at least some portion of the cutbacks in such services. They examine how some nonprofit organizations have taken a proactive stance in this regard by implementing efforts that do not simply react to political and social change, but attempt to initiate and guide it instead. They attempt to change the political environment in which they operate, and the result has been to change the face of local politics in many jurisdictions. Each chapter of their book explores these expanding and emerging roles. Themes and focuses vary, which in turn reflects the variation and complexity within the nonprofit sector itself. At the same time, each chapter presents an emerging political or policy role now being played by today's nonprofits and voluntary associations, and a theoretical context in which such activities and behavior can best be understood. Scholars and advanced students in public administration, economics, and nonprofit management, as well as executive-level nonprofit managers, will find here an important update on what is happening in their special worlds, and the knowledge they need to make sense of it.

Originally published in 1985 Urban America Examined, is a comprehensive bibliography examining the urban environment of the United States. The book is split into sections corresponding to the four main geographic regions of the country, looking respectively at research conducted in the East, South, Midwest and West. The book provides a broad cross section of sources, from books to periodicals and covers a range of interdisciplinary issues such as social theory, urbanization, the growth of the city, ethnicity, socialism and US politics.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of housing: an increasingly difficult quest in the contemporary urban United States, where crime, urban blight, and continuing capital decay undercut the advantages of city living. The American dream has moved to the suburbs; the nightmare of our cities prompts new recognition both in the president's cabinet and the college curriculum. The editors of this book have updated their acclaimed earlier collection, providing new introductory articles; new papers, such as, Discrimination in Housing Prices and Mortgage Lending, A Summary Report of Current Findings from the Experimental Housing Allowance Program, Alternative Mortgage Designs and Their Effectiveness in Eliminating Demand and Supply Effects on Inflation; and a new bibliography of the literature. Additional chapters focus on differing strategies for improved urban housing and renewal by providing concrete suggestions for distributing existing resources and allocating new funding. The bibliography provides the best single guide to the current literature on housing. Housing Urban America, in this new edition, is an important guide to those students and scholars fascinated by the essential questions of adequate housing: its social costs, and the source of the revenues to provide it.

This revised textbook for courses on urban politics challenges the notion that the field is dominated by political economy, showing that despite the undeniable importance of economic issues, citizens do play a significant part in urban politics.