It goes on to show that, despite the Fair Housing Act of 1968, segregation is perpetuated today through an interlocking set of individual actions, institutional practices, and governmental policies. In some urban areas the degree of black segregation is so intense and occurs in so many dimensions simultaneously that it amounts to "hypersegregation."The authors demonstrate that this systematic segregation of African Americans leads inexorably to the creation of underclass communities during periods of economic downturn. Under conditions of extreme segregation, any increase in the overall rate of black poverty yields a marked increase in the geographic concentration of indigence and the deterioration of social and economic conditions in black communities.As ghetto residents adapt to this increasingly harsh environment under a climate of racial isolation, they evolve attitudes, behaviors, and practices that further marginalize their neighborhoods and undermine their chances of success in mainstream American society. This book is a sober challenge to those who argue that race is of declining significance in the United States today.

    With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared. It also reveals Jacobs's eye for the telling human and social details that bring streets and communities to life.An extensive introduction discusses the importance of streets in creating communities and criteria for identifying the best streets. The essays that follow examine 15 particularly fine streets, ranging from medieval streets in Rome and Copenhagen to Venice's Grand Canal, from Parisian boulevards to tree-lined residential streets in American cities. Jacobs also looks at several streets that were once very fine but are less successful today, such as Market Street in San Francisco, identifying the factors that figure in their decline.To broaden his coverage, Jacobs adds briefer treatments of more than 30 other streets arranged by street type, including streets from Australia, Japan, and classical antiquity in addition to European and North American examples. For each of these streets he has prepared plans, sections, and maps, all drawn at the same scales to facilitate comparisons, along with perspective views and drawings of significant design details.Another remarkable feature of this book is a set of 50 one square-mile maps, each reproduced at the same scale, of the street plans of representative cities around the world. These reveal much about the texture of the cities' street patterns and hence of their urban life. Jacobs's analysis of the maps adds much original data derived from them, including changes of street patterns over time.Jacobs concludes by summarizing the practical design qualities and strategies that have contributed most to the making of great streets.

    The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good. "The future will require us to build better places," Kunstler says, "or the future will belong to other people in other societies."The Geography of Nowhere has become a touchstone work in the two decades since its initial publication, its incisive commentary giving language to the feeling of millions of Americans that our nation's suburban environments were ceasing to be credible human habitats. Since that time, the work has inspired city planners, architects, legislators, designers and citizens everywhere. In this special 20th Anniversary edition, dozens of authors and experts in various fields share their perspective on James Howard Kunstler's brave and seminal work.

    The AIA Guide to Chicago, Second Edition, showcases more than 1,000 individual buildings, along with more than 400 photographs - many taken expressly for this volume - plus 35 specially commissioned walking maps. The book is arranged geographically so that the user can tour each area of the city as conveniently as possible. Building descriptions focus on the illuminating - but easily overlooked - details that give the behind-the-scenes, often unexpected story of why a building took the shape it did.

    Its annual operating budget is now a staggering $29 billion a year, plus it has a capital budget of $4 billion more. The city and its various agencies employ approximately 360,000 full-time workers. The Office of the Mayor alone employs some 1,600 people (and spends some $135 million). And the Police Department boasts a small army of over 25,000 officers, with a budget of $1.5 billion. Anyone wanting to make sense of an organization this vast needs an excellent guide. In Power Failure, Charles Brecher and Raymond Horton provide a complete guidebook to the political workings of New York City. Ranging from 1960 to the present, the authors explore in depth the political machinery behind City Hall, from electoral politics to budgetary policy to the delivery of city services. They examine the operation of the Office of the Mayor and the City Council, covering everything from the number of members and their annual salaries (Council Members receive $55,000 per year, the Council President $105,000) to the mayoral races of John V. Lindsay, Abraham Beame, and Edward I. Koch. Much of this encyclopedic work focuses on New York's ever-present financial woes, including the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, when the City had an unaudited deficit of over a billion dollars and the public credit markets closed their doors. They examine the repeated failure of collective bargaining to set wage policy before the annual operating budget is set (which undermines the integrity of the budgetary process), and they look at the main source of revenue, the property tax (homeowners pay 84 cents per hundred dollars of market value, commercial property owners pay $4.31, a politically motivated imbalance which the authors find economically harmful and grossly unfair to renters and businesses). Finally, they examine service delivery and discover, not surprisingly, that the highest local taxes in the nation are not spent efficiently. The authors offer detailed looks at the uniformed services (police, fire, sanitation, corrections), the Department of Parks and Recreation, and the Health and Hospitals Corporation (which operates the country's largest municipal hospital system), revealing which departments are run well and which are not. For New York City residents, this is an essential volume for understanding City Hall. Indeed, anyone baffled by big city government--whether you live in New York or in any major metropolis--will find in this volume a wealth of information on how to run a city well, and how to run it into the ground.

    --Chester Hartman, President, Poverty and Race Research Action CouncilIn Shelter Poverty, Michael E. Stone presents the definitive discussion of housing and social justice in the United States. Challenging the conventional definition of housing affordability, Stone offers original and powerful insights about the nature, causes, and consequences of the affordability problem and presents creative and detailed proposals for solving a problem that afflicts one-third of this nation. Setting the housing crisis into broad political, economic, and historical contexts, Stone asks: What is shelter poverty? Why does it exist and persist? and How can it be overcome?Describing shelter poverty as the denial of a universal human need, Stone offers a quantitative scale by which to measure it and reflects on the social and economic implications of housing affordability in this country. He argues for the right to housing and presents a program for transforming a large proportion of the housing in this country from an expensive commodity into an affordable social entitlement. Employing new concepts of housing ownership, tenure, and finance, he favors social ownership in which market concepts have a useful but subordinate role in the identification of housing preferences and allocation. Stone concludes that political action around shelter poverty will further the goal of achieving a truly just and democratic society that is also equitably and responsibly productive and prosperous.