When cities were popular places to live, they were expensive places where service workers couldn't afford housing alone in the city center. Clerks, secretaries,

When cities were popular places to live, they were expensive places where service workers couldn't afford housing alone in the city center. Clerks, secretaries, and assistants would rent lodgings---often shared rooms---in boarding houses, or attics and spare rooms in other people's houses. Everyone else with less stable jobs, either slept in their place of business If they were lucky, or slept in dormitories, and "flop houses". In the US, I'd hesitate to call it an improvement when the cities became unpopular, and the newly minted middle class chose to live in the suburbs, with tech parks, and factory parks. Then the poor could live affordably in cities, which people would still go to for entertainment, but crime sky-rocketed, and educational opportunities plummeted till inner city schools were the worst in the country. To me, the issue of the underclass is systemic. You can't bandage over it with rent-control, or temporary welfare programs. The only way to deal with it is a universal entitlement that anyone, of any income, benefits from like for example universal healthcare which in Europe has leveled out infant mortality rates between the poor and the middle classed. If we could provide education, food and housing in the same universal way, it would eliminate much of the issue of inequality.