in seven cities fell by half. The bulk of housing even in derelict neighbor-hoods is equipped with toilets, central heat, running water, and other amenities. For all that, the state of contemporary inner-city poverty areas, as measured by such indicators as violent crime, drugs, steel-shuttered shops, abandoned buildings, and street life, is generally perceived to be a retrogression from the past. To a considerable extent, that failure is the price paid for the advances in housing. As striving urban families upgraded their living conditions by moving outside of urban centers, they left behind concentrations of the disadvantaged. If Europe and Japan envy America's shelter resources, there is wonderment and usually scorn for America's chronic urban blight. Foreign TV frequently dispatches its camera crews to bring back audio-visual accounts of the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that show the underside of a progressive and generally well-housed nation.

A second failure is the persistence of racially segregated neighbor-hoods. Housing standards of blacks, on the average, have substantially improved, and there has been a long-term increase in black homeownership accompanied by more recent gains in suburbanization. But traditional segregation indexes revealed only modest gains in 1980 over 1960, more evident in such metropolitan areas as New York and Los Angeles than in Chicago and Detroit. Those indexes, one should note, are not designed to take account of the changing locational patterns of other minorities, especially Hispanics and Asians. Although both of these groups are settled in heavy concentrations, they appear to be dispersing more noticeably than are blacks. Given the heavy flows of Third World immigrants since 1965, a migration that has no imminent ending, it seems timely to experiment with more comprehensive ways of measuring diversification.

Housing's third failure—a rise in real costs—is the most pervasive of all. It is a trend that affects every income class, every type of housing, and every area. It baffles every policy maker. Although the quality and coverage of available cost indexes leave a good deal to be desired, cumulated data indicate that the rise since the 1890s in the costs of producing and operating a dwelling unit has outstripped, by a factor of two to one, the rise in the prices of other consumer goods and services. It has also greatly outstripped the rise in income and, still more, in disposable income. That trend is at the crux of what has come to be known as the affordability problem, which has replaced physical deficiencies as the leading indicator of unmet housing needs.

The following chapters will deal with today's affordability problem in detail. To grasp the affordability problem in a different way, one might observe that the new unsubsidized tenements of the turn of the century—