Geography of Opportunity
MIT professor seeks to revive housing debate

Fall 2006, Volume 28, Number 1

Xavier de Souza Briggs

After 35 years of housing policy debate, “most white Americans don’t think housing discrimination is much of a problem anymore, and many black Americans are ambivalent about integration,” said Xavier de Souza Briggs, associate professor of sociology and urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But expanding housing choice is the most important invisible social policy issue in America today.”

Briggs, a former acting assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, explored some of the themes from his latest book in a November 29 lecture co-sponsored by the Institute for Policy Research, the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, and Chicago Metropolis 2020. The book, The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press, 2005), had more than 20 contributors including himself and IPR Faculty Fellow James Rosenbaum, an expert on public housing and mobility.

Briggs spoke about how the nation has become more racially diverse and how rates of segregation between blacks and whites have declined. Yet segregation within racial groups, drawn on economic and class lines, has been growing, he said. IPR Faculty Fellow Lincoln Quillian, an associate professor of sociology and a panel discussant, noted that the close connection between racial segregation and high poverty neighborhoods persists in the United States. “If we didn’t have racial segregation,” he said, “the number of high poverty neighborhoods would drop enormously.”

Unequal housing choices and suburban sprawl have confined the poor and minorities to areas where opportunities for better jobs, schools, and health-care access are severely undermined, Briggs said.

With 45 million new housing units needed in the next 25 to 30 years, Briggs recognizes this as an enormous opportunity. He identifies three key components to any viable solution: expanding housing choices, protecting the choices that people currently have, and enabling people to make the best choices possible. He also sees employers, faith-based organizations, and unions, all with vested interests in expanding housing choices, as vital parts of a broad constituency for change.

“We are the most diverse society in human history, with few roadmaps for our future, so we need imagination, courage, and commitment,” he concluded. “Expanding housing choice is a linchpin of the opportunity agenda.”