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The spatial diffusion of poverty and the demographic profile of the “poor” in cities like Los Angeles, where 1.7 million residents of the greater metropolitan area qualify as such, suggest that poverty is neither a socioeconomic exception nor affiliated with a singular sociocultural or racial group. However, our policy discourse and solutions continue to suffer from a modernist/industrial era explanation of poverty and its spatial concentration. In this paper, I will offer an alternative interpretation of economic development in the 20th century and propose that development projects fit comfortably into the political philosophy of nation building and the social construction of citizenship. Under the umbrella of social justice and democracy, many regions of the world, including the inner city, have been envisioned as landscapes of social and political instability and targeted for development as such. Here, the equating of development with stability is examined theoretically to suggest that anti-poverty policies, both in the US and the UK, can be viewed as an extension of the 20th century modernist nation-building agenda. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]