The crack epidemic did not arise in Mantua overnight as in the city and the nation-at-large, there was a long, slow slide towards crack in this neighborhood. Social scientists describe these “new morbidities” as the harmful cumulative effects of flagrant racial inequities in housing, employment, education, and criminal justice in combination, governmental actions in these social sectors fostered an environment in which crack could thrive.

In the 1980s, Mantua had the tinderbox conditions that made the highly addictive crack a deadly temptation to which many disaffected youths and young adults succumbed all too readily: concentrated poverty, lack of meaningful employment opportunities, education failure, and widespread anomie and despair. A comparison of the two census tracts that composed Mantua from 1980 to 1990 suggests the social and economic conditions that made this neighborhood a prime “social setting” for the crack cocaine epidemic of those decades.įocusing on Mantua, a particularly hard-hit community, illuminates the web of social forces that led to the widespread distribution and consumption of crack, the catastrophic effects of the epidemic, and the response of both government agencies (negative) and local community activists (positive). As we have seen, Mantua experienced the outmigration of middle-income residents who left in search of safer and more prosperous neighborhoods, in part as a response to seriously declining conditions.

Prey crack status