Until the last quarter of the 20th century racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but is…

Although some comparisons among three diverse cities were made, the three cities were selected precisely because they represented diverse clusters of urban problems. San Jose, California, was the scene of very rapid growth for more than a decade. St. Louis, Missouri, on the other hand, contained the prototypical problems of a declining central…