Metro and Regional Inequalities
Research in this section focuses attention on the structure of economic and social opportunities created by the intersection of metropolitan and regional housing, education, transportation, growth, workforce and other policies, all within a context of often dramatic demographic changes.
The challenges to creating and implementing an anti-discrimination agenda call for a renewed, creative agenda that recognizes the structural, multi-layered impediments to opportunities faced in minority communities. The most obvious, although often overlooked, is the interrelationship between housing and schools, especially residential segregation by class and race. Other topics are less familiar, such as the relationship between racial justice and "smart growth," or racial justice evaluations of metropolitan transportation planning.
Recent Metro and Regional Inequalities Research
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More than Money: The Spatial Mismatch Between Where Homeowners of Color in Metro Boston Can Afford to Live and Where They Actually Reside
- Few people argue that segregation is purely a result of market forces, or that it is due entirely to discrimination. Most recognize that the answer must lie somewhere in between. Policy efforts must focus on removing any remnants of discriminatory practices, and must also find ways to attract and retain populations of color in communities that are affordable to but devoid of households of color.
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Beyond Poverty: Race and Concentrated-Poverty Neighborhoods in Metro Boston
- Metropolitan Boston needs a serious discussion about racial equity. The region is in the midst of a period of rapid racial change but there is a widespread perception that either nothing needs to be done explicitly about race, or nothing can be done because of failures in the city of Boston in the past. Many people think that issues of discrimination have been solved and that everyone now has an equal chance.
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Segregation in Neighborhoods and Schools: Impacts on Minority Children in the Boston Region
- Nearly 30 years after a court ordered Boston’s city schools to desegregate (1974), school segregation continues to be a major obstacle to equal opportunity for minority children in the Boston metropolis. The issues are national in scope, but in Boston we see especially clearly how limited are the impacts of policies that are only implemented within city boundaries. Blacks and Hispanics are unusually concentrated in the City of Boston and a handful of older outlying towns and cities, while residential suburbs where most whites live hardly share in the growing ethnic and racial diversity of the region.
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Moving to Equity: Addressing Inequitable Effects of Transportation Policies on Minorities
- A joint report of The Civil Rights Project and the Center for Community Change that identifies surface transportation policies’ inequitable effects.
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Integrating Neighborhoods, Segregating Schools: The Retreat from School Desegregation, 1990 - 2000
- Paper prepared for the conference on the Resegregation of Southern Schools.
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Integration or Resegregation: Metropolitan Chicago at the Turn of the New Century
- The data show that the Chicago metropolitan area is at an extremely important point in its racial and ethnic history. The White population can continue to turn its back on their African- American and Latino counterparts, in a fruitless effort to escape them. Or they can embrace them and, in unison, build an integrated metropolitan area.
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Race, Place, and Opportunity: Racial Change and Segregation in the San Diego Metropolitan Area: 1990 - 2000
- The future of the San Diego area is inexorably linked to the well-being of its minority populations, most strongly in the cities and inner-suburbs, but increasingly throughout the region. While moderately-high levels of racial segregation characterize the City, recent trends raise the specter that this pattern may be duplicated in growing suburbs, especially for Latinos.
