Xavier de Sousa Briggs, The Geography of Opportunity

Growing up, many of us learned to think of poverty as a “lack of income.” But the reality in American cities is not nearly that simple. By building tall public housing units that isolate poor people all in one area, by making it difficult for African Americans to get bank loans to move into suburban areas with asset-building and educational opportunities, and by zoning suburban areas for large single-family homes, the United States has systematically produced tremendous concentrations of minority poverty. Many of the features we associate with these ghettos - violence, gangs, unemployment, bad schools - are not inevitable facets of poverty. Instead, they result from poverty’s concentration - what happens when anyone who can do so leaves a neighborhood, and those left behind find themselves isolated economically, physically, and culturally from much of the rest of the city, without enough of a tax base to maintain their schools and with too few role models to mentor children.

Since Hurricane Katrina and the riots in France, ghettos have reappeared - if in a limited fashion - on the national radar. Why were people living in such desperate conditions in New Orleans, and what can we do to prevent that in a rebuilt New Orleans? What would lead teenagers to riot, and how can we help stem their hopelessness? These are some of the many questions that can’t be answered without reference to housing segregation. A perfect entry point, then, for Xavier de Souza Briggs’s newest book, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America.

The Geography of Opportunity is an edited volume, with contributions from some of the major figures in the fields of housing opportunity and civil rights. It is nothing if not ambitious, attempting to examine all the major facets of housing segregation. The book includes theoretical essays on racial preferences in housing choice, analyses of governmental housing programs like Section 8 and Moving to Opportunity, and discussions of the impact of regional government and efforts to curb suburban sprawl.

Not surprisingly then, The Geography of Opportunity is distinguished in part by its breadth. Yet that very breadth makes it difficult to glean something coherent from reading the book. It is somewhat unclear where Briggs hopes to situate the collection within the broader debates about segregation, or what particular impact he wants it to have. That said, The Geography of Opportunity makes a strong case for the importance of housing segregation as a civil rights and social justice concern. Particularly notable are discussions of metropolitan-level politics rarely seen in such volumes.

Academics are the predominant contributors, including James Rosenbaum, whose research on the Gautreaux program in Chicago was one of most conclusive demonstrations that neighborhoods can have dramatic effects on people’s life prospects. The book also includes a few chapters by activists, such as civil rights lawyer Phil Tegeler, now at the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, and Angela Glover Blackwell and Judith Bell, from the non-profit PolicyLink.

Several of the chapters reflect the very real tension between the way academics and activists look at these problems. While some advocates are inclined to argue for large-scale policy programs to address segregation, certain academics propose proceeding more cautiously. For example, research, including the work of James Rosenbaum, has shown that moving low-income residents to wealthier suburbs results in dramatically better life outcomes for many of the individuals who move. Some activists (including noted civil rights attorney Alex Polikoff in my interview with him in Issue 9 of The Next American City) have used such research to argue for a national mobility program. Yet several of the academics in The Geography of Opportunity would resist such large steps for now. In Rosenbaum’s chapter, “New Capabilities in New Places: Low-Income Black Families in Suburbia,” co-written with sociologists Stefanie DeLuca and Tammy Tuck, the authors question whether we understand the mechanisms that helped families to succeed in the suburbs enough to be sure we can replicate that success. The people involved in mobility programs like Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity may have had better life outcomes, but why? Did it depend on the friendships the families developed with people in the new neighborhoods? On the race or class of their next-door neighbors? If we don’t know what caused the positive outcomes, can we be sure we’d repeat those conditions in a new program? On an even more pragmatic level, sociologist John Goering questions in a separate chapter, “Expanding Housing Choice and Integrating Neighborhoods: The MTO Experiment,” whether HUD knows how to handle the logistics of scaling up the operation, from finding the most amenable cities or communities for a mobility program to identifying which families would most benefit from the program.

Another contentious question addressed in the book is what drives continuing segregation (as opposed to historical segregation). If prejudice against African Americans drives segregation today, that may have different policy implications than if segregation is driven by fear that property values will decline in African-American neighborhoods or by the desire of African Americans to live with other African Americans. In “Can We Live Together? Racial Preferences and Neighborhood Outcomes,” Camille Charles uses data from the major study on racial housing preferences, the Multicity Study of Urban Inequality, to argue that racial prejudice drives neighborhood preferences. Her chapter, while fascinating as a stand-alone piece, is also an example of some of the collection’s missed opportunities. Because Charles’s chapter is the only one on this topic in the book, readers may potentially lose sight of the fact that scholars are actively debating this topic and arriving at very different conclusions. Even more significantly, perhaps, other chapters in the collection only engage with Charles’s chapter in a peripheral way—her work is referenced, but its implications for policy are not explored.

As a collection featuring some of the top thinkers on this topic, The Geography of Opportunity had a real opportunity to look at segregation multi-dimensionally and force academics and activists to enter into dialogue with each other in a way that often doesn’t happen. This book, with its very separate chapters and incredible breadth, is not that kind of collection. Nonetheless, the book features many well written essays on housing by experts in the field. And that, it should be said, is still nothing to snuff at.

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Ellen, Ingrid Gould. Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Goering, John, and Judith D. Feins, eds. Choosing a Better Life?: Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2003.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

PolicyLink: www.policylink.org

Polikoff, Alexander. Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2006.

Poverty and Race Research Action Council: www.prrac.org

Rubinowitz, Leonard S., and James E. Rosenbaum. Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.