Race, Poverty, and Urban Sprawl: Access to Opportunities Through Regional Strategies   by john a. powell

            This article attempts to demonstrate the need for social justice and urban civil rights advocates to focus on sprawl as well as concentrated poverty.  The article posits that these are as much civil rights issues as environmental or land use issues and that sprawl has frustrated civil rights efforts.  Indeed, there is strong evidence that racialized concentrated poverty is both a cause and product of sprawl and that, due to this interrelationship, concentrated poverty cannot be addressed without addressing sprawl.  To examine this relationship, the author explores how the phenomena of gentrification and the revitalization strategy of in-fill operate differently in rich, middle-class, and poor cities.  Finally, the author argues that concentrated poverty and sprawl are regional issues that can only be addressed on a regional level; therefore, it is a mistake for social justice and urban civil rights advocates to leave the regional discussion to environmentalists and land use planners.

  Introduction 

            This article explores the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty.  Although there has been inadequate attention given to this relationship, a number of scholars have recently begun to examine it more closely.^[1]  This article strongly supports that effort and will briefly set out some of the historical and current processes that clearly link sprawl and concentrated poverty.

           In discussing this inattention, I will focus on two specific phenomena related to concentrated poverty and sprawl: the failure of urban civil rights and social justice advocates to target the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty on one hand and the oftentimes confusing response to gentrification on the other.  The nexus of gentrification and concentrated poverty is possibly the most misunderstood and least explored aspect of concentrated poverty as a social phenomena.  In the latter half of this essay I will turn attention to that issue.

           I engage these issues with a focus on racialized concentrated poverty.^[2]  Although I am not indifferent to sprawl, per se, my primary concern is to demonstrate why it is critical for civil rights and social justice advocates to address sprawl and to better understand gentrification in the wider scope of remedying problems associated with concentrated poverty.  Sprawl is not simply a problem that warrants cursory attention by civil rights advocates.  Indeed, it is one of the most important structural urban dynamics that frustrates many of the broad aspirations of the civil rights movement.  The article is written for a wide audience as these issues affect the entire country, but I am particularly concerned with engaging the civil rights community.

I. Urban Sprawl and Its Effects on Central City Communities     

            Urban sprawl, which has long been a reality of the American landscape, has recently drawn attention as a serious problem that must be addressed.^[3]  While there are still those who would challenge the claim that sprawl is a problem in want or need of a solution,^[4] a number of policy makers have joined the ranks of environmentalists in the call to address and retard the proliferation of urban sprawl.^[5]  Terms like planned growth, smart growth, sustainable growth, and no growth are gaining currency in popular discourse.  This evolving public discourse and the problems associated with sprawl usually focus on environmental and land use issues.^[6]  These issues include traffic congestion, long commutes, lost time and efficiency for businesses, depleting habitats of endangered species, and the destruction of farmland and open space.  In sprawl discourse, issues of concentrated poverty and race, if discussed at all, are too often mentioned as peripheral concerns.

            Suburban residents and the environment are not the only victims of sprawl.  Sprawl isolates inner-city communities from economic and educational opportunities.  Concentrated poverty, defined as a poverty rate at or above 40% within a given area, is closely aligned with several sprawl-related trends in urban America.  These trends include a decrease in population density in central cities as primarily white, middle class people flee, and the movement of employment opportunities to the outer reaches of the region following this demographic shift away from the central city.^[7]  These sprawl patterns have contributed to the destructive pattern of concentrated poverty and the isolation of low-income communities and communities of color from economic opportunities.  It was the concentration of middle class whites at the periphery of the region that helped cause and made possible the concentration of low-income minorities at the center.  Racial discrimination and segregation have played important roles in creating and reinforcing these sprawl patterns.^[8]  Racial discrimination in housing, employment, and educational opportunities, has operated to concentrate poor communities of color in the central city while economic opportunities as well as middle and upper class whites have moved out to suburbia.

            As mentioned above, with the suburban flight that has been occurring over the last few decades, much of the employment base has also fled the central cities.  In 1970, only 25 % of the nation’s offices were located in suburbs.^[9]  More recent numbers indicate that over 60% are now located in the suburbs.^[10]  Many city residents have not been able to follow this migration of jobs.  The lack of transportation choices in metropolitan areas limits options for those without cars and it prevents central city residents from accessing jobs located in the suburbs.^[11]  There are also limited housing choices for lower income residents in the suburbs--many developing suburban communities limit or prohibit multifamily housing and have minimum lot sizes and other restrictions that push up the cost of housing.^[12]  Racial steering and redlining have also played roles in limiting housing choices for many people of color; isolating them in central city neighborhoods and declining suburbs while denying them the opportunity to develop wealth through home ownership.^[13]  From this isolation of people of color and low-income people in the central cities, have developed a number of related problems--including chronic unemployment, increased crime, and failing schools.^[14]  Solving these problems is beyond the ability of local government, especially in light of their declining tax bases.^[15]  The deteriorating state of many cities drives still more middle class families to the suburbs.  This pattern continues today as many central cities continue to lose population while their suburbs grow.^[16]

            There are some who claim that urban sprawl is a free market outcome and that it is actually the preferred life-style of most Americans, as evidenced by the tremendous growth of suburbs.^[17]  Such claims do not fully account for the government’s role in creating sprawl, as well as the lack of access to opportunities for minority communities.  The federal government provided the highways that helped pave the way out for the fleeing middle class, and insured the cheap FHA mortgages that helped buy many suburban homes.^[18]  At the same time, this financing was not initially available to many central city residents and people of color due to official and informal policies of redlining, racial steering, and refusing loans to residents that remained in the city.^[19] 

            The costs of sprawl, including increased traffic and the increased cost of infrastructure, are becoming more evident every year.  People are beginning to realize that the negative effects of hollowing out the urban core caused by sprawl cannot so easily be confined to the central city.^[20]  There is growing evidence that the fate of the city and suburb are inextricably linked.  Studies indicate that the better the central city does, the better the suburb does;^[21] and during the last recession, the metropolitan areas with the greatest income differential between central city and suburbs suffered the most.^[22]  Inner ring suburbs are now suffering many of the same problems central cities faced a generation ago.^[23]  In today’s global economy, regions compete with each other for capital and jobs.^[24]  Crippled central cities and declining suburbs can serve as a drag on the whole regional economy.^[25]

            There are currently a number of limited anti-sprawl solutions.  Many of them are aimed at slowing the outward spread of suburban growth--usually by buying land on the fringe of metropolitan areas.  Despite or maybe because of these limited efforts most metropolitan areas have not been effective in slowing sprawl.  Even in the absence of effective government action, however, there are signs of change and a possible reorientation of middle-class residents back to the city.  After years of flight, there are modest signs of people moving back to downtown areas.  Cities like, Houston, Cleveland, Denver and Chicago are seeing an influx of upscale residents moving into downtown neighborhoods.^[26]  Although this influx is hopeful, the numbers are usually not enough to offset the number of people still leaving the central city.

            The weak anti-sprawl movement and the influx of new residents to the city are at best, only partial solutions to sprawl and concentrated poverty.  Job growth and entry level employment opportunities are projected to continue to be concentrated in the suburbs of most metropolitan regions.^[27]  Educational opportunities are still grossly unequal for city and suburban residents.^[28]  And housing choices continue to shrink as existing affordable housing is being demolished or upgraded out of the reach of lower and middle income residents without being replaced.^[29]  To effectively address the issues of sprawl and concentrated poverty it is necessary to closely examine how sprawl patterns dictate the location of these opportunities denied to low-income communities of color.  Regional strategies are critical to remedy these inequities in meaningful ways.

II. Sprawl and Concentrated Poverty: A Nexus Too Often Ignored

            The growing anti-sprawl movement is frequently spearheaded by those in the suburbs who have not traditionally focused on inner city social justice issues.  At the same time, social justice advocates who work on issues associated with racial segregation and concentrated poverty traditionally do not focus directly on land use policy outside of their immediate neighborhood.^[30]  Many anti-sprawl and social justice advocates have failed to recognize the important connections between these seemingly disparate  issues.  This is more than a small oversight.

                A.     Political Fragmentation Disables Desegregation

            Earlier I suggested that sprawl and fragmentation had effectively undermined the aspirations of the civil rights movement.  How and when did this occur?  Before the civil rights movement there was forced segregation of blacks and whites imposed by law.  We are all familiar with this racial caste system referred to as Jim Crow.  The civil rights movement was an attack on that system.  However, the dynamics of sprawl and jurisdictional fragmentation largely blunted the civil rights movement.  While the civil rights movement was concerned with ending segregation, the court and policy makers adopted a different approach that distinguished intra-jurisdictional segregation from inter-jurisdictional segregation, thus limiting desegregation efforts and remedies to segregation within local political boundaries.^[31]  This clever legal distinction rendered many desegregation efforts virtually meaningless and made a mockery of the goals of the civil rights movement.

            The increased deference to local political boundaries occurred almost exactly at the same time as the early gains of the civil rights movement.  This move toward greater fragmentation in the wake of the civil rights movement was not just a coincidence, but part of a deliberate move to compromise the idea of integration while responding to the growing demands for racial justice by blacks.^[32]  Gregory Weiher notes the role of political boundaries in maintaining segregation despite the efforts of the civil rights movement.

The tendency of boundaries to perform this function has been increased by public policy produced from the late 1940s to the seventies and early eighties.  In the presence of a persistent aversion to blacks on the part of whites, public policy has not ameliorated residential segregation.  Rather, it has restructured it by presenting these whites with altered incentives and institutional forms.  The result has been a change in the geographic pattern of rather than a reduction in, residential segregation.^[33]

            Weiher goes on to note, “Civil rights policy has substantially dismantled neighborhood level, or ‘intrajurisdictional’ [sic], mechanisms of segregation.  But federal court policy has reinforced devices which support interjurisdictional [sic] racial segregation.”^[34]  This re-sorting of whites, not just to new neighborhoods but to new cities, explains the persistent racial segregation in housing markets and in non-Southern schools despite the efforts of the civil rights movement.  Indeed, one study has shown that the more fragmented a region, the more racially and economically segregated it is.^[35]  And importantly, blacks were not simply being segregated from whites but also from opportunity.^[36]

            One community worker calls the fragmentation associated with sprawl the 1990’s version of states’ rights.^[37]  Support for states’ rights was a strategy often used by civil rights opponents in the early part of the civil rights movement to undermine desegregation efforts at the federal level.  Opponents of civil rights would argue that federal laws governing civil rights infringed on states’ rights to govern themselves.  Thus, through states’ rights they attempted to circumvent the gains of the civil rights movement.

            There is a historical connection between the push for states’ rights and the current political fragmentation at the municipal level.  Both movements have used fragmentation and local control to prevent desegregation.  The local control advocated by states’ rights proponents was state control to circumvent federal laws.  The local control and fragmentation associated with sprawl is a more refined version of the same localism touted by states’ rights advocates and is used by residents of the municipalities to exclude low income residents of color while trying to attract high tax base resources.  Sprawl, as a method of fragmentation, perpetuates the dysfunctional dynamic of our regions and is a continuation of the sorting and local control movement that undermined civil rights desegregation efforts dating back to the 1950s.  

            Concentrated poverty can be equated with racialized space at the urban core because these isolated low-income populations are also disproportionately populations of color.^[38]  Economist Anthony Downs and urban scholar David Rusk have asserted that where there is a sprawling metropolitan area with political fragmentation and a substantial presence of racial minorities, you will have concentrated poverty and racial segregation at the urban core.^[39]  This phenomena is not simply the result of naturally occurring economic sorting or private policy over the last fifty years.  Poverty in America is racialized and systemic; it is the product of well documented, formal and informal, racially discriminatory federal, state, and municipal policies, including housing and transportation policies that encourage middle-class whites to flee the city for the suburbs.^[40]

            Concentrated poverty is both a substantial cause and product of sprawl.  On one hand, concentrated poverty has been a strong causative force behind sprawl.  The fear of minority ghettoes and barrios and the social problems often associated with the poverty there, is one of the causes of white and middle class flight from the core of metropolitan areas; a flight that has created and exacerbated sprawl patterns.^[41]

            On the other hand, it is the abandonment of the urban core itself that creates and causes concentrated poverty, which is then used to justify white flight.  It is not the poor concentrating themselves or moving to the center, but rather upper and middle class residents moving out to the periphery that causes the isolation of low-income people of color.  Policies that have encouraged sprawl over the last fifty years have also fostered concentrated poverty as key opportunities quickly followed middle-class whites’ flight from the urban core.  Urban residents were left behind with a declining tax base, shrinking employment opportunities, a failing educational system, and a shortage of decent, affordable housing.^[42]  There is an economic incentive for middle-class suburban residents to keep out those with high needs and few resources.  This, coupled with racial discrimination and whites’ aversion to blacks’ takes a high toll on low income blacks.^[43]

            While it is difficult to address issues of sprawl without addressing concentrated poverty, it is virtually impossible to address issues of concentrated poverty without dealing with sprawl.^[44]  Strategies to alleviate concentrated poverty and racial discrimination center on gaining access to or creating economic and educational opportunities.  Since sprawl patterns have largely shaped the spatial placement of these opportunities, it is virtually impossible to substantially address concentrated poverty without addressing sprawl.

            I have posited that sprawl and fragmentation caused concentrated poverty and undermined the civil rights movement.  But if this is even modestly correct, then why is it that traditional civil rights and social justice advocates have not been more active participants in the attack on sprawl?  There are a number of explanations for the failure of these communities to address sprawl as a strategy for addressing issues of race and poverty.  While the list of possible explanations I provide here is not exhaustive, it presents some of the most significant barriers to working on social justice issues in the context of sprawl discourse.

            One explanation is simply proximity.  Sprawl is primarily, but mistakenly, viewed as an issue at the edge of the metropolitan region, with little impact or direct relevance to the issues of the urban core.  Many people involved with social justice issues in the urban core are often unaware of, and as a result, unconcerned with, what is happening so far from their neighborhoods and cities.  Most of the active players addressing concentrated poverty issues are people working on a grass-roots level, often through Community Development Corporations (CDCs).  The focus of most CDCs is to lift the economic level of the communities’ residents.^[45]  It is often not immediately apparent to these communities that the resources they need to bolster their communities are being pushed away by the problems related to concentrated poverty and pulled away by sprawl patterns.  Strategies addressing sprawl that seek to increase density and build up the tax base by drawing in the middle-class and businesses to create a more stable, mixed-income community are seldom advocated by anti-sprawl regionalists.  Additionally, these strategies often seem irrelevant or threatening to the present population.

            A second explanation is the suspicion and resistance that urban communities have toward regional approaches.^[46]  Regionalism suggests the need to move beyond fragmented jurisdictional approaches toward cross-jurisdictional cooperation as a means to address issues that impact the entire region.^[47]   Many inner-city communities of color have resisted regional strategies for fear of losing cultural control, cultural identity, and political power within their communities.  Indeed, this fear is well founded since the redrawing of political boundaries has often been used to disempower the minority community.^[48]   However, some theorists have failed to address concerns over disempowerment by suggesting that, although minority communities may currently have political control over their communities, in reality, due to the lack of resources in their community or re-isolation within the political system, this control is ineffectual.^[49]  The logic behind this position is that, even if minorities have to give up control in order to participate in regional strategies, they have nothing to lose because, in effect, they have control over nothing significant.

            The Hobson’s choice that is apparently presented by these two assertions is that inner-city communities of color can either have insignificant self-control, or have access to resources but no voice or identity.  These are untenable choices that have been and should be rejected.  But rejecting these choices is often seen as the same as rejection of regional or metropolitan efforts.  This is a mistaken assumption as the dichotomy these choices present is a false one.  Regional approaches are necessary to adequately address the inextricable issues of sprawl, race, and concentrated poverty because these are regional problems and the solutions are not found solely or even primarily within the neighborhoods or cities where concentrated poverty is located.  As the Mayor of Detroit, Dennis Archer, has recently noted, “we can’t save our cities unless we save our farmland.”^[50]

            I have suggested a form of federated regionalism to mediate the concerns about disempowerment and the need for addressing concentrated poverty.^[51]  Federated regionalism is a regional approach that preserves political and cultural status within communities or cities, while sharing regional resources and responsibilities, and balanced regional policymaking.^[52]  This approach provides the opportunity to preserve and build on the assets of the inner city community while tapping into the resources and opportunities located elsewhere in the region.

            Another explanation for many urban civil rights advocates’ failure to enter the sprawl discourse is their suspicion and skepticism of urban revitalization as a policy for bringing in or maintaining the number of middle class households in the urban core.  The fear is that by allowing middle and upper-income residents into their neighborhoods through in-fill or gentrification, complete displacement of low-income residents will ultimately result.  This concern has both class and racial underpinnings.  While concentrated poverty generally depicts a method of sorting low-income racial minorities at the urban core, gentrification is a way in which middle and upper middle class whites are sorted into urban areas by displacing low-income minorities.^[53]

            Although gentrification in high poverty cities is often a charged and contentious political issue, I believe that concerns about gentrification are more appropriately raised in rich cities, not poor cities.  The issue is more nuanced in middle class cities.  This approach may seem counter-intuitive given that, rich cities have resources and low poverty rates and poverty does not seem to be an issue.  But when viewed in a wider context of how racial and class sorting occur in metropolitan areas, the approach takes on clarity.

            By rich cities, I refer to central cities that have a median per capita income and fiscal capacity close to or above the average for the region in which they are situated.  In addition, rich cities will usually have a growing or stable population base.  San Francisco and Seattle are examples of rich cities.  Middle class cities are cities that have 70-90% of the regional median per capita income while poor cities have less than 70% of the regional median income.^[54]  Rich cities may appear to have no serious concentrated poverty issues, certainly not of the magnitude of poor cities such as Detroit and Cleveland.  This perception, however, obscures how rich cities sort along racial and class lines through gentrification and how this method of sorting is related to concentrated poverty.  Rich cities appear to have few problems with concentrated poverty because their sorting practices displace or keep most low-income minorities out of their cities where opportunity is concentrated, while relocating them in nearby poor cities and suburbs.

            It is possible that a region is doing so well that the isolation of poor minorities associated with concentrated poverty is simply not an issue.  However, this situation is not likely, which makes it necessary to examine what is actually occurring in these rich cities and their surrounding regions.  In San Francisco, the number of high poverty census tracts has remained comparatively low and stable at 12-13 since 1970 while most large American cities in the Mid-west and Northeast have experienced a large increase in number of high poverty census tracts during this same time period.^[55]  Through a closer examination of the forces behind this low number of high poverty tracts, we find that lower-income residents, even those with modest means, are being pushed out of the city and into areas where there is concentrated poverty, such as Oakland, or in other suburbs away from opportunity.  This is disturbing for a number of reasons.  Not only are people being pushed out of their homes and away from opportunity, they are also being pushed into areas with fewer social resources to address the needs of low-income residents.  In essence, the dynamics of isolation remain the same, they are just relocated.

            We find a similar sorting going on in places like Seattle.  Seattle, which had only 9 high poverty census tracts in 1990, is a place where economic resources in the region are concentrated in the central city.^[56]  At the same time, many of the low-income residents are being pushed out into southern working class suburbs such as Renton.^[57]  This context of gentrification could be called extra-jurisdictional gentrification in that low-income residents are not simply being pushed out of their neighborhood but also out of their city.

            To exacerbate the problems of displaced residents, poor cities and marginal working class suburbs receiving the displaced have declining resources and growing need.  In these suburbs many of the long-term residents are white and many of the residents coming in are people of color.  This is a recipe for racial tension and resentment.^[58]  Because both the Bay Area and the Seattle area are fragmented along jurisdictional lines, these rich cities are in a sense subsidized by this sorting process since they do not have to share their resources with the low-income residents they have displaced to nearby suburbs or cities.  In so doing, these rich cities fail to take their fair share of responsibility for the social needs they have helped create in other locations within the region.

            Contrast this experience of extra-jurisdictional or complete gentrification with the experience of many high poverty cities.  In many high poverty areas or cities, any effort to attract or build housing for middle class households is misconstrued as gentrification.  It is both a conceptual and political mistake to confuse gentrification with efforts to attract middle class households back to poor cities, however.  For example, in cities such as Cleveland and Detroit which have a large number of high poverty census tracts populated primarily by low income people of color,^[59] as well as a large number of vacant lots and homes,^[60] there is an effort to attract middle class residents.  The effort to attract middle-income housing in these areas is better characterized as in-fill housing and the goal is to build housing on vacant land or rehab existing housing that is not being used.

            In-fill housing can be built in areas where there is little or no existing housing or in areas where some housing already exists.  While in-fill can involve any type of housing and other non-residential projects, it is the filling in with middle and upper middle class homes that is most frequently associated or confused with gentrification.  Gentrification is usually understood to mean the transition of a neighborhood caused by the in-migration of middle and upper middle class residents who are most often white, and the resulting forced out-migration of low-income residents who are frequently people of color.^[61]  Given this understanding, an in-fill project is not gentrification because no one is being pushed out.^[62]

            In-fill housing can be used as a strategy to create stable mixed-income communities.  In contrast, gentrification occurs when middle or upper income gentrifiers move into economically depressed neighborhoods to restore older housing stock or build new housing and, in so doing, displace current residents from affordable housing.  The mixed income communities that result from gentrification are generally not stable, but transitional; transitioning from largely low-income to exclusively upper and middle-income communities.  Revitalization efforts that have the goal of creating stable mixed-income neighborhoods through in-fill or partial/small-scale gentrification, should be distinguished from extra-jurisdictional gentrification that pushes the poor out of the cities.  This distinction is vital to strategizing to create stable, mixed-income neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

            Poor cities tend to possess more than their share of their region’s low-income housing.  Among other things, this means that the city does not have the buying power or the tax base of other areas in the region.  The poor city lacks the resources it needs to attract investment and address the greater social and infrastructure needs of its residents.  Detroit, for example, is a city with an aging infrastructure that was designed for two million people but now serves a population of just over one million residents mostly of modest means.^[63]  Given the dearth of population, especially residents in the middle and upper-income brackets, Detroit overburdens relatively few residents with the cost of supporting this infrastructure.  This places a tremendous economic strain on the city.  In addition, many of the jobs and other resources associated with opportunities are more likely to be found outside of poor cites.  These cities need a strategy to capture a fair share of the opportunity base including the tax and job base of the region.  Trying to attract middle-income residents and middle income housing is a rational strategy for these cities to pursue because it brings in a much needed boost to revenues, and creates buying power which in turn creates even more revenue for the central cities.

            Despite the promise of expanding the central city’s resources, such strategies are often contentious and strongly opposed by inner city residents of color.  Although there are a number of reasons for this opposition, I will focus on four.  The first, which has been a primary focus of this essay, is that this method of city revitalization is mistakenly perceived as a gentrification process that will displace inner city residents from their existing neighborhoods.^[64]  The second is that in poor cities there is still likely to be unmet low-income housing needs; causing resistance to revitalization efforts that focus on middle income households with the least need of assistance.  The third reason is that it has not been made clear to low-income communities why attracting middle class households will benefit the city or its existing residents.  Finally, revitalization efforts are perceived in racial ** terms.  That is, they are viewed as a political ploy specifically intended to pander to white suburbanites and hurt blacks and other people of color.

            Our history gives all four of these concerns credence.  Consider, for example, the urban renewal of the sixties.^[65]  This policy, which appears similar to the proposed in-fill strategies, often hurt minorities while it benefited whites.^[66]  Another basis for these concerns is the fact that whites fled to the suburbs as blacks came to the central city.  Because of this, minority communities often perceive any return by whites to the city ** as an effort to retake the city.^[67]  Indeed, even in Oakland today there is support for this perception as there is some indication that the new mayor is taking a public posture that uses black disenfranchisement to draw whites back to Oakland.^[68]  There is also the concern that low-income people, often people of color, need assistance in the housing market by developing and subsidizing affordable housing.  But the city simply cannot address the housing and other social needs of low-income citizens of the region by itself.  If poor cities continue to import poor residents while exporting opportunities and resources, a role historically consigned to cities by the federal government and the region, the cities will cease to function.

            Despite their often justified concerns, it is a mistake for low-income communities to oppose policies that provide a better balance of mixed-income housing stock in the city.  While it is conceivable that some partial/small-scale gentrification in poor cities will occur, it must be stressed that gentrification is not the central issue facing poor cities.  In fact most poor cities will continue to lose population especially middle-class residents, even with the implementation of in-fill programs.  The pull of sprawl and the push of concentrated poverty that already exist in these cities cannot be adequately addressed unless the sprawl and fragmentation issues are more directly confronted by inner city communities.

            Rich cities that engage in extra-jurisdictional gentrification usually have small, politically marginalized low-income minority populations that cannot alone mount an effective opposition to on-going displacement.  By contrast, in cities with large numbers of low-income minorities, allegations of gentrification are used as a racial coding to oppose whites moving back to the city.  The reality is, in most of these poor cities there is little, if any, gentrification occurring.  If residents are displaced it is more likely to be to a nearby neighborhood in the city through what I have termed intra-jurisdiction gentrification.

            While any displacement raises legitimate concerns, the intra-jurisdictional gentrification that may occur in modest amounts in poor cities and the extra-jurisdictional gentrification in rich cites are of a different order.  The concern in poor cites is less likely to be displacement in terms of housing but rather a fear of displacement in terms of power.  There is concern that the influx of whites to the city foreshadows white domination.  While there may be a basis for such fear, as the experience of Oakland appears to be bearing out, cities like Detroit and Cleveland are far from being at risk of political domination by whites.   Nonetheless, low-income communities of color in these poor cities evoke the same fears of displacement and disempowerment to oppose an influx of whites.

            The future of middle-class cities, such as Minneapolis is more difficult to foresee.  The balance in middle class cities is much more delicate and requires constant attention.  In middle-class cities intra-jurisdictional  gentrification and displacement are more likely to occur than in poor cities.  Despite this influx of middle and upper-income residents, these cities are still losing population and remain oversubscribed in terms of low-income housing.  In light of this dynamic, similar to that of poor cities, it does not make sense for low-income communities to oppose active attempts to attract and keep middle class residents.  In middle-class cities, middle-class housing in-fill projects are valuable in low-income neighborhoods where there are many vacant lots.  Instead of opposing it, middle-class cities should welcome middle-class in-fill, but with a vigilant eye toward the ultimate goal of access to opportunity for low-income communities. 

            V. Regional Strategizing for the Future

            The common thread for understanding the housing needs and the ways in which opportunity is sorted in rich, middle-class, and poor cities is through a regional approach.  In evaluating each of these types of cities, one must look at how population and opportunity is being sorted by race and class on a regional level.  We must then adopt strategies that give people meaningful access to opportunities.  From a regional perspective, concentrated poverty in the cities or declining suburbs is a method of isolation and containment and should be opposed.

            If the ultimate goal is to provide low-income people of color access to the opportunity structures from which they have been excluded, then communities should seek to build stable mixed-income, racially integrated communities with access to opportunities.  There are those who believe you can alleviate concentrated poverty by bringing opportunities to poor city neighborhoods through localized revitalization efforts, thus avoiding the regional discussion.  However, these efforts have generally failed unless they have been linked to a larger metropolitan goal.^[69]

            The strategies that should be pursued to provide access to opportunity differ greatly among rich, middle-class, and poor cities, because their experiences of racial and class sorting differ greatly.  Poor cities must overcome their fear of displacement and recognize that their volatile resistance to the influx of middle-income residents through in-fill is vastly out of proportion to the actual threat posed.  Poor city communities should refocus on the ultimate goal of access to opportunities and resources.  By refocusing their strategies, low-income communities of color and social justice advocates will recognize that attracting middle-income residents and businesses is a logical next step to continue the civil rights movement’s goal of true access to opportunities.