There’s No Magic Bullet for Cleveland’s Poverty

But by Acknowledging the Myriad Causes and Effects of Low Incomes, the City Is Making Tremendous Progress

Until the recent NBA championship of Lebron James’ Cavaliers, Cleveland has been known for topping a different kind of list—cities with the highest levels of poverty.

Since 2000, Cleveland has always made the list of the top five big cities with high poverty. While the national poverty rate stood at 15.5 percent in 2015, the rate in Cleveland was 39.2 percent, ranking second only behind Detroit among cities with populations of 300,000 or more. Cleveland also ranks high in child poverty (54 percent), in the top 10 cities with populations …

What My Teacher James Q. Wilson Missed

His Achievements Were Huge-But So Were His Blind Spots

Around 1962, I took James Q. Wilson’s undergraduate course on urban politics and learned a lot about cities, classes, political machines, and reformers. He was an untenured professor just starting …