RD, I am glad you asked!  How could the inner cities arrive at such a point of nihilism and despair?  For starters, nearly all the industrial jobs, that attracted people to big cities decades ago, have been removed and sent to the Third World where their corporate owners can pay slave or near slave wages.  Jobs have been replaced with drugs and guns that feed an endless cycle of violence and hopelessness.  Since at least the Nixon administration, white politicians have made careers by creating laws and policies that imprison as many inner city residents as possible thereby perpetuating the cycle.  More recently, white politicians starve those cities of resources only perpetuating the cycle further.