Since President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of War on Poverty and the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, optimism that had surrounded those measures has faded. The economic, fiscal, and social conditions of the old central cities have declined, while their inner-ghetto areas have become zones of calamity. Their residents are not only living in poverty, but they must also contend with levels of drug use and violence that, although currently in decline, would have seemed inconceivable in the early 1960s. Even though the march of urban decline was evident then in abandonment and crime, there was optimism that the vast productivity of the . economy,.
