These factors include, for example, the loss of jobs due to the industrialization of the American economy; the departure of middle-class blacks-who provided the social glue that helped to hold neighborhoods together-to more affluent areas; policies that channeled blacks into dense,high-rise public housing; the lack of investment in keeping up the housing stock in inner-city neighborhoods; and urban renewal that displaced African Americans from their homes and disrupted their communities (see Wilson, 1987, 1996,2009).