In 1997, both the underlying confidence and optimism are hard to sustain. The War on Poverty and its successor programs seem to have made little impact on those populations that are at the lowest economic levels in . society. If anything, the widening income distribution and the curbing of governmental expenditures for these groups have left them worse off. Yet one result of the efforts to address poverty in the intervening years has been the growth of well-articulated theoretical notions coupled with serious efforts to ground these ideas in empirical analysis. Much of the work does not specifically speak to urban poverty or the conditions of life.
