Poverty, by America

Chapter 9 describes the final step required to abolish poverty—namely, the end of segregation between the poor and everyone else. Allowing the poor into wealthier neighborhoods, even without increasing their incomes, has a profound impact by removing them from the many social ills that fester in high-poverty areas.

Many of the boldest proposals surrounding poverty focus on giving them more money, but Desmond worries that this is just another way to make people feel like they are solving a problem without requiring meaningful structural action. The experience of segregation has trained people to keep the poor at a distance and turn their problems into an abstraction, and so the solution must be to quite literally place the problem on people’s doorsteps.

The same arguments against class integration were used against racial integration, and they proved false: Integrated Black children did better in school, while white children remained largely unaffected. Integration actually does more to improve student outcomes than an increase in educational resources. One way to move forward is to adopt inclusionary zoning ordinances, which not only forbid an exclusionary policy toward public housing but also actually incentivize and, in some cases, require active efforts to build affordable housing. Many other countries have led the way on this policy, and in the United States, New Jersey has made the greatest strides toward inclusive housing while also ranking first in the nation in public education.