Preface

In 1966 Stokely Carmichael wrote in The New York Review of Books that integration “has been based on complete acceptance of the fact that in order to have a decent house or education, blacks must move into a white neighborhood or send their children to a white school. This reinforces, among both black and white, the idea that ‘white’ is automatically better and ‘black’ is by definition inferior.” The solution, he argued, was real power for black people and black communities such that “Negroes become equal in a way that means something, and integration ceases to be a one-way street.” This expression of the tension between integration on the one hand and community development on the other is as relevant today as it was in 1966. Indeed, given the current policy interest in residential mobility and moving people to “opportunity neighborhoods” as a way of addressing inequities, and given what I describe in this book as the aggressive spatial strategy of current fair housing advocacy, a renewed examination of the one-way street of integration is well warranted.

Many will no doubt see this book as a lamentable indulgence that has greater potential to foment tension than to explain or resolve it. Most of those people, however, are fair housing advocates who have mounted a systematic and far-reaching challenge to community development and affordable housing efforts. Community developers and affordable housing providers feel themselves subject to attack and thus are a bit more willing to see these issues broadly addressed.

I spent a couple of years working for community development corporations (CDCs) in San Francisco and Los Angeles, served for many years on the boards of directors of two of the most productive and successful CDCs in Minneapolis, and have conducted research on the housing and community efforts of nonprofit organizations. While I agree with fair housing advocates about the need for more affordable housing in white, suburban areas, I disagree strongly with the notion of some in that movement that CDCs are ineffectual in the neighborhoods in which they operate and that their efforts are harmful. This book is prompted by that perspective and also by the fact that I live in a metropolitan area where the debate between fair housing and community development is especially contentious.

I have been assisted by many in this endeavor, though none should be blamed for its shortcomings. Neeraj Mehta of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs does the work of connecting community development efforts to larger questions of regional equity in the Twin Cities, and as such helps to establish the model for efforts to combat the problems of segregation and inequities of place without setting integration as the solution. He joins many in this work, among them Maura Brown, Owen Duckworth, Caty Royce, and Nelima Sitati-Munene. Their work is the inspiration for mine. I don’t know who among these activists was the first to say, “Everyone deserves to live in an opportunity neighborhood,” but this idea animates the current work, and you will see that I have borrowed the phrase for my conclusion. I am also indebted to the efforts of Jeff Matson, Kristen Murray, Andrew Tran, Tony Damiano, Ned Moore, Malik Holt-Shabazz, and Brittany Lewis at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Many in the housing and community development movement in the Twin Cities, including Alan Arthur, Jack Cann, Greg Finzell, Jim Roth, Deidre Schmidt, and Tim Thompson, have also influenced and encouraged my thinking on these issues. But these issues are salient across the nation, and the book has been spurred forward (knowingly or not) by many outside the Twin Cities, including Chris Walker of LISC, Catherine Bishop of the National Housing Law Project, Michael Bodaken of the National Housing Trust, and Sheila Crowley, formerly of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. David Imbroscio of the University of Louisville and Karen Chapple at the University of California, Berkeley, have helped make the manuscript better, as have the anonymous reviewers and my editor at Cornell University Press, Michael McGandy. I also benefited from the feedback of my favorite civil rights attorney, Sam Hall. Finally, my family, Susan, Hanne, Mary, and Greta, have taken a substantive interest in the book from the beginning and have made their contributions to its completion.

I would also like to acknowledge my cat Squirt for waking me up each morning at four thirty by sitting directly upon my head. This has made for some tense moments between us, but in the end it was always win-win—I got up to work on the book, and he got breakfast.