Maldistribution of public services is widely believed to be a predictable outcome in city politics. One common supposition is that the quality (or “responsiveness”) of municipal services in neighborhoods derives from “policies” deliberately set by high-ranking “decision-makers.” Another is that service patterns vary with the extent of neighborhood “power,” which is presumably related to the strength of a district's community groups, which in turn depends on local socio-economic status. Either way the model of “who gets what” is systematic: in the first instance a purposive scheme is being perpetrated. In the second, there is a “pluralist bias” which is also predictable: middle and upper-middle class districts, because of superior organizational resources, get favorable treatment; the “powerless” urban poor are invariably short-changed; and the lower-middle class or working class sectors tend to drop somewhere in between.