In response to concerns about Cuyahoga County’s unacceptable poverty rate, which had surpassed the nationwide average, the Cleveland Center for Urban Poverty and Social Change was established at Case Western Reserve University in 1988 with joint funding from the Cleveland and Rockefeller Foundations. Under the leadership of director Claudia Coulton, the center set out to provide the area’s socioeconomic policymakers with previously unavailable data that might help to explain the county’s high and ever-increasing poverty rate.

Released in 1989, the so-called Coulton Report revealed the precise geographical areas with high concentrations of poverty and helpfully broke down poverty into four types based on degrees of newness or persistence. The growing demand for a highly educated workforce, the outmigration of jobs to the suburbs, the isolating influence of public housing and the sharp decline in economic investment in central-city neighborhoods—all played a role in impoverishing individuals and families. In pinpointing the causes of poverty, the Coulton Report contained the germs of new ideas about how to combat the problem.