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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO REGIONAL EQUITY AND RACIAL JUSTICE -- 1. THE INTEGRATION IMPERATIVE -- 2. AFFIRMATIVELY FURTHERING COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT -- 3. THE "HOLLOW PROSPECT" OF INTEGRATION -- 4. THE THREE STATIONS OF FAIR HOUSING SPATIAL STRATEGY -- 5. NEW ISSUES, UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS, AND THE WIDENING DEBATE -- Conclusion: EVERYONE DESERVES TO LIVE IN AN OPPORTUNITY NEIGHBORHOOD -- Notes -- Sources -- Index

"Public housing was an integral part of the New Deal, as the federal government funded public works to generate economic activity and offer material support to families made destitute by the Great Depression, and it remained a major element of urban policy in subsequent decades. As chronicled in New Deal Ruins, however, housing policy since the 1990s has turned to the demolition of public housing in favor of subsidized units in mixed-income communities and the use of tenant-based vouchers rather than direct housing subsidies. While these policies, articulated in the HOPE VI program begun in 1992, aimed to improve the social and economic conditions of urban residents, the results have been quite different. As Edward G. Goetz shows, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and there has been a loss of more than 250,000 permanently affordable residential units. Goetz offers a critical analysis of the nationwide effort to dismantle public housing by focusing on the impact of policy changes in three cities: Atlanta, Chicago, and New Orleans. Goetz shows how this transformation is related to pressures of gentrification and the enduring influence of race in American cities. African Americans have been disproportionately affected by this policy shift; it is the cities in which public housing is most closely identified with minorities that have been the most aggressive in removing units. Goetz convincingly refutes myths about the supposed failure of public housing. He offers an evidence-based argument for renewed investment in public housing to accompany housing choice initiatives as a model for innovative and equitable housing policy."--Publisher's website

David Imbroscio's argument about exclusionary zoning contains several salient arguments that deserve the attention of those working on issues of housing justice, racial justice, and urban equity. Attention to Imbroscio's concerns can strengthen efforts to produce greater regional equity in American metropolitan areas. I find two main elements of his argument, however, unconvincing. First, his assertion that the anti-exclusionary zoning movement "is underlain by a deep commitment to neoliberalism" is a misreading of the greater history and aims of anti-exclusionist advocacy and scholarship. Second, his claim that anti-exclusionism is anti-democratic suffers from an overly narrow and process-focused concept of democracy that ignores historical and enduring power dynamics of local land-use politics as they are and have been expressed within a system of White racial domination.

This article offers a critique of developments within fair housing thought in the United States that have brought it into conflict with community development approaches to high-poverty, segregated urban neighborhoods. I argue that the spatial strategies of Fair Housing have expanded from an initial orientation toward opening up the suburbs to nonwhite occupancy to efforts aimed at breaking up communities of color in central areas. The shifting gaze of Fair Housing toward neighborhoods of concentrated poverty has manifest itself in both a criticism of and opposition to affordable housing programs in central areas and support for what Chicago Fair Housing Attorney Alexander Polikoff calls the "radical surgery" of displacement and demolition of existing communities of color.