least desirable residential areas (Cell, 1982; Fix & Struyk, 1993), thus leading to physical segregation. In the mid-1970s an era of deindustrialization took place, during which many jobs disappeared or left the inner city, resulting in a reduction in the kind of well-paying, low skill based blue-collar jobs that African American men had found when they migrated north (Squires, 1992; Wilson, 1987). As a result, many African American men who had earned good wages in the factories found that they were not well-qualified for the remaining jobs in the inner city and were often unable to afford the commute to suburban settings where many of the more plausible employment opportunities existed.
