It is now more than 12 years since the publication of William J. Wilson and Robert Aponte’s (1985) survey of urban poverty in the United States. That report still stands alone as an effort to produce “a state of the art review of research and theoretical writing on urban poverty” (Wilson and Aponte, 1985). However, in the intervening years, there has been much work on and even more debate about the nature and causes of poverty in . inner cities. Much of the contribution, indeed, may be attributed to Wilson, who has sparked a new round of work in the field. At the same time, there.