The Inequality of Opportunity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2025
Chapter 8 urges us to focus less on the spatial distributions and concentrations of people of different races in cities and more on the effects of concentrated members of racial minorities living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. From a “neighborhoods effects” analysis, some of the worst land-use injustice is the inequality of opportunity that comes from African Americans and Latines growing up in and living in high-poverty neighborhoods with poor housing, high crime, and low-quality schools. Public policy is failing because neither our research nor our policy solutions center on the relationships between race and poverty, instead often using race-only measures of segregation, or on the characteristics of neighborhoods that cause them to succeed or fail in ensuring equal opportunities for their residents, including neighborhood-specific crime data and comprehensive understandings of the residents’ everyday lives. The chapter calls for multi-faceted policies that address a range of interconnected factors, including the rising cost of housing, barriers to housing mobility, and the conditions of high-poverty neighborhoods affecting life opportunities for their residents.
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