When you sit in front of the city council or local media and present your findings, heads nod. Concentrations of poverty make no sense. “When there are concentrations of poverty,” you tell your client, costs for services rise, crime increases, and a range of negative impacts result, not least of which is the huge missed opportunity for so many living in such terrible situations to find opportunity and make their way forward. But when it comes to acting on the recommendations – whether in the form of inclusionary zoning, or density bonuses, or mixed-income encouragements – then the heels dig in. Can’t. Nuh uh. Property rights. Property values. Fear takes hold. You can see it in their eyes. Those people near me? Not on my watch. When you open the discussion of what it is they are concerned about, I have learned it is the image they have of the troubles sure to follow. In their minds any low income family in their neighborhood is tantamount to importing all of West Baltimore right next door. Much of the work is to modulate an even handed conversation about the differences between affordable housing and the challenge of tackling poverty, the difference between today’s poverty of a family and endemic and chronic and systemic poverty. and the difference between the diffusion of poverty and the deconcentration of it. These are hard conversations.
