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10 Dispersal as Anti-Poverty Policy Edward G. Goetz and Karen Chapple Recent diagnoses of urban problems in both Europe and the United States have emphasized the spatial dimensions of inequality. That uneven urban development is manifest in the geography of urban areas has been the principle underlying a string of urban policies and planning initiatives in the United States since the 1940s. The expansion of a local development authority embodied in the public housing and urban renewal programs of the depression and postwar eras was an attempt to buttress the sagging fortunes of central city areas in the face of capital shifts to suburban areas. As the contrasting trajectories of central and suburban areas sharpened during the 1960s and 1970s, spatially oriented policies multiplied. The idea of equal opportunity motivated urban policy through this period with passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The civil disturbances of the 1960s, followed by the McCone and Kerner Commission reports, made it clear that residents of inner-city ghettos lacked economic opportunity, and suggested that greater opportunity lay in the suburbs—if only the obstacles that led to residential segregation could be overcome. The goal of creating a more even landscape of opportunity resonated for urban policymakers, long accustomed through tools such as eminent domain and urban renewal to attack social issues from a spatial lens. In the 1970s, as enthusiasm for the War on Poverty waned and public housing came increasingly under attack, urbanists increasingly pushed strategies that would address uneven opportunity by changing the spatial distribution of the population. Initial forays into such an approach included brief attempts at creating regional approaches to affordable housing development, “opening up” the suburbs to minority populations, and creating a housing allowance program (Section 8) to allow subsidized families the ability to move into middle-class neighborhoods. 149 150 Edward G. Goetz and Karen Chapple In the United States, these programs (and other urban policies) suffered during the Reagan era, only to resurface again in the 1990s in a much more focused and aggressive form. Since the 1990s, efforts to disperse the poor for their own benefit and for the good of the community have dominated the field of community development and led to widespread experimentation with “mobility programs” and the displacement and demolition approach to public housing redevelopment. Three conditions in late twentieth-century U.S. cities led to the resurgence and prominence of spatial strategies in community development. Interrelated and interdependent, these three conditions —spatially concentrated poverty; violent crime associated with the control of illicit drug markets in inner-city neighborhoods; and the physical, social, and economic decline of social housing estates—have provided the impetus for the emergence of a policy of poverty dispersal. The evidence at hand, a combination of scholarly research and popular press coverage about the intensely corrosive nature of concentrated poverty, crime, and the extreme dysfunction of public housing, led to a widely accepted belief that the dispersal of the poor, forced if necessary, was required to improve their lives and conditions in the nation’s “hyper-ghettos.” The objectives of poverty dispersal are to reduce the social pathologies associated with high concentrations of poverty and to provide greater equality of opportunity for lower-income families within urban areas. Dispersal strategies draw their moral justification, at least implicitly, from the work of John Rawls (1999 [1971]). The idea of equality of opportunity comes from Rawls’ difference principle, which argues that not only should “offices and positions” be open to all, but also that all should have the opportunity to acquire the skills necessary in order to achieve in a meritocracy (see Williamson Chapter 11, this volume). In order to realize opportunity, individuals need equality in “primary goods”—the prerequisites, both social and natural, for rational individuals to achieve their life plans. Social goods include rights, liberties, and opportunities, which confer the capacity to realize goals, as well as income and wealth; natural goods include health, intelligence, and imagination. Dispersal policy is meant to achieve a more just distribution of opportunities and resources across metropolitan areas by breaking up pockets of poverty, creating more housing choice in the suburbs (where primary goods are concentrated), and revitalizing the older inner-city neighborhoods with an influx of upper-income residents (which should improve primary goods). In this sense, dispersal is a logical extension of a decades-long orientation to urban policy that focuses on the spatial manifestation of social inequalities. We argue...

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