In many of the nation's metropolitan regions, the outer edges enjoy growth and prosperity, while central cities and declining suburbs experience overall population loss and intensifying concentrated poverty. These disparities are more than geographic - they are racially and economically distributed, with areas populated by communities of color impacted most adversely. Though divided by highways, subdivisions, and municipal borders, all parts of the region share a common responsibility and a common fate. Keeping a region healthy requires coordination on the issues of housing, employment, transportation, education, and other key racial and economic equity concerns. In these ways, every resident of the region can gain fair access to crucial opportunities.

Two interrelated forces are largely responsible for regional disparities:

1. suburban sprawl and its corollary, metropolitan fragmentation (the division of the metropolitan region into separate, exclusive municipal districts); and
2. racialized concentrated poverty (meaning high neighborhood or city poverty that disproportionately impacts communities of color).

• Sprawl and Fragmentation. Suburban sprawl and its counterpart, metropolitan fragmentation, siphon regional resources, jobs, educational opportunity, and tax bases from central cities and economically depressed suburbs, and transfer them to developing suburbs through the process of middle-class suburbanization and exclusionary land use practices. The borders between the city and the region's numerous suburban jurisdictions become barriers that allow developing suburbs to amass resources and tax base while walling off greater social need in the central city and inner-ring suburbs. They also greatly limit access to opportunities that emerge in these suburbs, such as jobs, for residents of the region's center.
  
  
• Concentrated Poverty. With their isolation from growing regional opportunities, central cities and declining inner-ring suburbs witness intensifying concentrated poverty and exacerbation of the social problems associated with it, including failing schools, a declining tax base, high rates of unemployment, and increasing crime rates. As these problems worsen, more middle-class and white residents flee to distant jurisdictions, intensifying disparities by taking with them much-needed resources.

Those who are racially and economically segregated in the region have little access to the prosperity abundant in the suburbs. Municipal boundaries and fragmentation have effectively "closed the door" to these opportunities, ensuring that all resources stay cordoned off in opportunity-rich jurisdictions.

Regional equity has three basic premises:

1. Regional health depends on the health of all sectors of the region;
   
2. Central cities and declining suburbs cannot confront the problems of racialized concentrated poverty independently, that is, without a regional focus; and
   
3. A regional approach to equity issues must support rather than undermine the political power, social cohesion, and sense of place of all residents of the region, but particularly those communities who have long been denied effective voice as a result of regional forces.
   

Achieving Regional Equity

No single initiative will alleviate the disparities that continue to grow within our metropolitan regions. A comprehensive set of initiatives is required to address the complex and cumulative nature of racial and economic segregation that is at the heart of regional disparities:

1. Economic Development Initiatives:

The economic vitality of a region depends on the well-being of its central city and declining suburbs. If these areas are faring well, the entire region will benefit.

• The focus should be on minimizing wasteful competition within the region and strengthening the regional economy by attracting new investment into the area. The entire region loses when a business relocates within the region because it has been heavily subsidized by a competing jurisdiction. Resource-poor central cities and inner-ring suburbs often cannot provide these subsidies.
  
  
• Redevelopment and revitalization efforts within central cities and their struggling inner-ring suburbs should focus on drawing residents and businesses back to regain the population and resources they have lost to suburbanization. However, protections should be put in place to ensure that gentrification, meaning the displacement of lower income residents of these revitalizing areas, often families of color, does not occur (e.g., via rent control and other housing preservation devices).

2. Housing Initiatives:

Affordable housing crises plague metropolitan areas across the country. Housing that is affordable is most often located in the central cities or inner-ring suburbs, far from developing suburbs where the region's opportunities are growing most rapidly. Affordable housing is often entirely unavailable in growing suburbs because exclusionary zoning, such as large lot size requirements, makes it difficult to build housing at a cost that low-income families can afford.

Locating affordable housing throughout a region is desirable because it allows low-income residents access to the opportunities such as jobs, better schools, and a solid tax base that supports social services, that have relocated in the suburbs. Taking a regional equity approach also means protecting housing in revitalizing areas of the central city and inner-ring suburbs, in order to prevent gentrification and the displacement of low-income residents and residents of color from areas characterized by emerging opportunities.

• Fair share housing remedies remove some of the barriers to creating affordable housing in the suburbs. Fair share housing affirmatively requires that the entire region support its fair share of the region's need for low-income housing, thus taking some of the burden off the central cities and ideally breaking down economic and racial segregation.
  
  
• Mixed-income development in high-poverty central cities and suburbs is a complimentary strategy to equalize the disparities among the central city and its more prosperous suburbs. By attracting the middle-class back to the city, resources may equalize and the health of the region could improve. Again, appropriate safeguards against gentrification and displacement must be created, or the development of mixed-income housing could force low-income families to other areas of economic isolation.

3. Education Initiatives:

Educational success is closely linked with residential location. Students attending schools in areas with high rates of poverty tend to fare less well than their counterparts in more economically stable schools. Given the intersection of race and poverty, the students attending high poverty schools tend to be students of color. Interdistrict desegregation is one solution to alleviating inequities among suburban and central city schools.

4. Employment Initiatives:

Closely linked to economic development, employment initiatives should address the growing spatial mismatch between the location of jobs and where workers reside. Businesses should be encouraged to enter into partnerships with communities to foster training, education, and employment practices that redress the racial and economic disparities across the region.

5. Transportation Initiatives:

Transportation initiatives should address the spatial mismatch of jobs and workers.
Transportation equity strategies ensure that transit projects focus on alleviating economic
and racial segregation, not simply making it easier for white, middle-class commuters to get to the city.

6. Tax-Base Sharing:

Tax-base sharing is a strategy to create equity across the region by allowing high tax base areas within the region to share these resources with the rest of the region, operating on the understanding that regional prosperity requires an equitable balance of resources and need.

7. Anti-Sprawl Initiatives:

Anti-sprawl initiatives that redirect growth back toward the central city and inner-ring
suburbs will promote regional equity. Containing haphazard development will prevent further isolation of low-income people of color from the opportunity structures of the region and can promote revitalization and redevelopment at the regional core. For these resources to truly serve the goal of regional equity, policies must work to ensure that low-income families and people of color are able to maintain housing in revitalizing areas and not be displaced to other areas of concentrated poverty.

8. Regional Governance:

Some form of regional governance may be necessary to effectively implement these regionally-focused initiatives. The regional equity initiatives outlined here rely on the transcendence of the fragmented jurisdictional system responsible for the parsing-out of regional resources and need. Moreover, a growing body of work has confirmed that the metropolitan region has become the economic unit of global competitiveness.