This critical evaluation of the efforts by the federal government to reduce poverty and alleviate inequality in the inner cities during the past decade is the work of two urban scholars who were themselves deeply involved in the design, implementation, and review of those programs from 1965 through the early 1970s. Their balanced, three-dimensional view is achieved through the double focus of academic detachment and practical experience.
Nathan Glazer has called Marshall Kaplan "the best social planner of the 1960s" and asserts that this book "does for 1973 what Herbert Gans's People and Plans did for 1963."
