Forum: Differing Opinions on Opportunity Hoarding

Article: "Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating Its Limits As An Account of Urban Inequality" 
Author:  David Imbroscio
Published Online: 17 Feb 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173979 

Commentary: "A Response to David Imbroscio: Neighborhoods Matter, and Efforts to Integrate Them Are Not Futile" 
Author:  Ingrid Gould Ellen
Published Online: 20 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173980

Commentary: "Follow the Money (Deeper)—A Clinical Diagnosis Of Opportunity" 
Author:  Andrew Greenlee
Published Online: 15 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173984

​Commentary: "Research Agenda Pending Revolution" 
Author:  Lisa K. Bates
Published Online: 13 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173983

Commentary: "Bringing Institutions Into the Opportunity Hoarding Debate" 
Author:  Casey Dawkins
Published Online: 14 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173981
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Commentary: "What Is An Opportunity Enthusiast To Do?" 
Author:  Michael C. Lens
Published Online: 13 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173982

Rejoinder: "Toward A New Project For Equality And Justice—Housing and Beyond: A Rejoinder" 
Author:  David Imbroscio
Published Online: 17 February 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2023.2173985

Since it was first introduced in 1998 (Tilly, 1998, p.10), the concept of “opportunity hoarding” has gained currency as a way to explain persistent inequality in metropolitan areas. It describes the efforts of wealthy, White individuals to lay claim to high-quality housing, schools, and public services, often in the hopes of securing benefits for their children, and to exclude minorities and low-income individuals from gaining access in hopes of “preserving” said benefits. 

Wealth and racial disparities in U.S. metropolitan areas are starker than ever, and the consequences are deeply felt both in the suffering of low-income individuals and people of color as well as in a political climate marked by racial and class tensions. But as with all attempts to address complex social issues, there are many differing diagnoses of the root of the problem, and even more solutions.  David Imbroscio’s provocative piece in Housing Policy Debate’s most recent Forum posits that resource hoarding is not the driving force behind urban inequality. As a result, he argues, attempts to address inequality through this lens are inefficient. Lisa Bates, Casey Dawkins, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Andrew Greenlee, and Michael Lens respond to and challenge these controversial claims with their own commentaries, allowing readers to reflect upon the complexity of this issue and come to their own more informed conclusions. 

The Provocation: David Imbroscio 
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Imbroscio divides the solutions typically suggested to combat opportunity hoarding into two categories: those attempting to reduce the barriers to entry into privileged enclaves, and those attempting to cause the exit and redistribution of hoarded resources away from said enclaves. Solutions in the first category often look like Montgomery County, Maryland’s Inclusionary Zoning program (Chetty et al, 2016), which allowed some low-income children to live in subsidized housing within affluent neighborhoods and thus access wealthier school districts. Imbroscio acknowledges that these programs have demonstrated that access to better funded educational opportunities leads to improved academic achievement. Yet he argues that these benefits are ultimately limited because the most valuable resource that resource hoarders have is not privilege-enabled access to higher quality housing, schools, and infrastructure, but the privilege of wealth and Whiteness itself. 

Citing research (Goetz et al., 2020; Orfield & Luce, 2012; Shapiro, 2017) on “suburban White flight”, Imbroscio posits that when privileged people are no longer the majority in their neighborhoods, they tend to leave, and in so doing, take away the privilege that enabled the accrual of neighborhood benefits in the first place. If programs like the one in Maryland were used to their full capacity, he argues, the low poverty rate of an initially affluent school district would increase to a moderate level. Previous studies (Schwartz, 2011) have shown that students attending school in districts with moderate levels of poverty don’t perform notably better than when they were in districts with much higher levels of poverty.

The benefits of inclusion, Imbroscio asserts, are even more muted for non-White, especially Black, children. Within affluent neighborhoods with Black and White families of similar socioeconomic background, black children are still excluded and discriminated against in a way that doesn’t allow them to gain the same benefits. As Junia Howell writes in her study, “The Truly Advantaged” (2019), “Blacks with comparable families complete the same level of education no matter whether they grew up in the most or least disadvantaged neighborhoods.” 

Similarly, according to Imbroscio, efforts to “exit” hoarded resources from these spaces, often by increasing taxes upon residents of wealthy neighborhoods in order to reinvest resources in low-income communities, are futile. These solutions either fail, as in the case of Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Policy, or are actively detrimental, as in the case of formerly redlined areas where increased investment led to higher property values and the displacement of Black residents (Robertson et al. 2022). 

Imbroscio blames what he believes to be a misguided emphasis on both education and location as predictors of socioeconomic mobility for the continued acceptance of the opportunity hoarding theory. He then offers a political economic counter-theory, i.e., that urban inequality actually stems from the growing imbalance between laborers and those who own business enterprises as well as the massive concentration of business ownership in the hands of a few. To remedy this root problem, he proposes investing in alternative business models in which the worker is also the owner, such as worker cooperatives, and housing models based around communal ownership, such as community land trusts (CLTs). 

Neighborhoods Do Matter: Ingrid Gould Ellen 

Ingrid Gould Ellen takes several issues with Imbroscio’s analysis, starting with his claim that efforts to remove barriers of access to privileged spaces don’t result in substantially better outcomes for the disadvantaged. She points to the Moving to Opportunity demonstration, which assigned low-income (primarily Black) families and children to higher-income neighborhoods and higher-performing academic spaces, resulting in markedly improved life outcomes. Further, she writes, Imbroscio’s calculus for how decreased barriers to entry result in a dissipation of benefits doesn’t add up: “The poverty rate in the United States as a whole is roughly 12%, which means that in a perfectly integrated world, all neighborhoods would be about 12% poor. There are plenty of stable neighborhoods with poverty rates hovering between 10% and 20%.” 

Regarding “exit” solutions, Ellen argues that although revitalizing disinvested neighborhoods may require a delicate balancing act, there are mechanisms such as place-based subsidized housing that can prevent displacement even while a neighborhood increases in wealth.
Finally, Ellen critiques Imbroscio’s proposed solutions by highlighting that investment in CLTs and cooperatives is not mutually exclusive with solutions targeted towards preventing opportunity hoarding, and they are much less politically and financially feasible than attempts to, for example, overhaul zoning laws. 

Follow the Money: Andrew J. Greenlee 

Andrew Greenlee first challenges Imbroscio’s critique of opportunity hoarding theory with a historical argument. He reminds Imbroscio that, as in the case of the 14th and 15th amendments, major political action taken to fight inequality has throughout history involved removing barriers of entry and exit to and from the elite’s stronghold of power. 

Greenlee spends most of his response, however, critiquing Imbroscio’s proposed solutions rather than his conceptual framework. Worker cooperatives and communally owned housing, he argues, are prey to the same problems with public and private funding and mutual governance that plague other entry and exit solutions, albeit on a grander scale. Greenlee argues that institutions where ownership is shared by renters or laborers, though valuable, often struggle to access funding through private and public means. This creates risks of corruption. For example, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), due to meager public funding, are forced to compete for private funding and subsequently alter their social goals in order to gain it (Getter, 2022). Insufficient funding also results in poor, conflict-ridden governance, as was the case with the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule. The mandate called for local actors to collaborate with the goal of addressing housing disparities, but due to a lack of funding, failed to successfully analyze and solve any of these barriers.

Lastly, Greenlee argues that Imbroscio’s dismissal of the importance of spatial geography limits the potential benefits of collective ownership, particularly through sharing resources like public infrastructure: “Principles of collective wealth sharing are a valuable starting place, but we also need to think about creating a more robust means of consolidating and sharing critical public infrastructures. Would Jackson’s water infrastructure have failed so catastrophically had white and affluent suburban residents been drinking the same water?” 

Research Agenda Pending Revolution: Lisa K. Bates 

​Lisa Bates takes a different approach than the rest; her commentary is less a rejoinder than a call to view the issue of urban inequality in a different light. Bates agrees with Imbroscio that inequality persists through the privilege of Whiteness and wealth. However, she finds the word “hoarding” to be an accurate description of the way this privilege is acted upon. The root problem is that White people refuse to share resources due to their own racism, and are able to do so because of their privilege. The solution lies in challenging racism itself. 

Bates argues that the majority of sociological research on inequality focuses not on ways to cause White people to change their behavior, but on analyzing the behavior of Black people in order to achieve their integration, writing: “I have listened to scholars' declaim, ‘If I were a poor Black single mother, I would...’ with total comfort and confidence to project their own mentality into a different lifeworld in order to explain how someone in a different body–mind ought to assess opportunities and costs. Researchers are relentless in explaining the choices and deficits of the people they ostensibly wish to help—and never turn their gaze to people most like themselves.” 

Bates proposes an alternative conceptual framework that places the burden of being a subject of analysis on those who are the problem. Under this framework, research should focus on such questions as, “Would learning more about Black people help real estate agents or property managers be less discriminatory when providing housing? Can young White people become more resilient to not being the numerical majority in a space? Is there an issue in education for teachers that reinforces over-policing and racism in classrooms?” 

Bringing Institutions into the Debate: Casey J. Dawkins 

Casey Dawkins critiques Imbroscio’s conceptual framing of opportunity hoarding on the grounds that it ignores the role institutions play in perpetuating urban inequality. In the United States, Dawkins notes, fiscal decentralization requires local governments to rely on local property taxes to fund public services. So, when racism places a premium on White-only neighborhoods in the form of higher property values, both homeowners who live in these neighborhoods and local government officials are incentivized to exclude racial minorities in order to preserve home equity and maintain the local property tax base. Further, they are able to do so because of the federal tax breaks and other privileges granted to homeowners. “If homeowners were not rewarded for inflating home equity, and local public goods and services were financed through something other than a tax on the value of real property," he writes, "spatial differences in property tax resources would be less likely to perpetuate spatial inequalities in local public good and service provision.”

Imbroscio’s argument falls short, then, because it ignores the role institutions play in enabling and incentivizing White supremacy. Similarly, Dawkins argues, Imbroscio’s critique of exit solutions fails to consider how reforming these institutions could lessen the need to transfer resources in the first place. 

What is an Opportunity Enthusiast to Do?: Michael C. Lens

Michael Lens takes issue with Imbroscio’s arguments against entry solutions, particularly his criticism of interventions like the Moving to Opportunity demonstration and Montgomery County’s inclusionary zoning policy. Lens acknowledges the limitations of small enclaves of affluence in accommodating large numbers of impoverished or non-White families. But the programs Imbroscio cites are incremental by design and demonstrate how changes in neighborhood socioeconomic opportunity improve positive outcomes. They are meaningful, Lens argues, in their ability to blur the stark segregation of urban spaces, making the “threat” of integration less threatening for the privileged majority, and less necessary in terms of resources and investment for the underprivileged minority. Lens also argues for increased housing production in these enclaves in order to expand their capacity. 

Additionally, Lens finds Imbroscio’s critique of exit solutions contradictory, writing, “At the end of this long section where gentrification and displacement are on center stage, I had the following muddled takeaway: if making places better works, then people will be displaced. But it doesn’t work. So we shouldn’t try it.” 

Imbroscio’s Rejoinder 

In his response to these comments, David Imbroscio stresses three points. The first is that American wealth inequality is a deeply serious and underestimated problem. To illustrate this, Imbroscio lists several statistics underlining the severity of poverty, unemployment, and showing how both issues intersect with race. 

Second, he maintains that the conceptual framework of “opportunity hoarding” and the solutions proposed to address it have failed. He decries the limited outcomes of previous efforts such as the Moving to Opportunity demonstration referenced by Ellen, and the marginal benefits that homeownership reforms proposed by Dawkins would have in the face of drastic inequality of capital ownership. 

Finally, Imbroscio emphasizes that a drastic overhaul of the American economy with the goal of strengthening labor is the only viable solution for urban income inequality. He acknowledges the legitimacy of concerns raised by Greenlee and others but sees no other options, writing, “Yet, if we care about equality and justice in America’s cities and metros, there seems to be no other path forward, given the Opportunity Project’s inability to achieve, at best, more than marginal results. Although it has become cliche to say, continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results indicates serious mental health concerns. There simply is no viable alternative to what I propose.”

While the road ahead is a hard one, the popularity of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, the racial justice uprisings of 2020, the increasing force of labor organizing, and the staunch efforts of the housing justice movement give Imbroscio hope that change is possible.



About the Contributors:

David Imbroscio is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Urban Affairs at the University of Louisville. 

Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the NYU Wagner School and Faculty Director at the NYU Furman Center. 

Lisa K. Bates is Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning and in Black Studies at Portland State University. She is the Portland Professor in Innovative Housing Policy.
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Andrew Greenlee is Associate Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 
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Casey J. Dawkins is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland and a research associate at the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth. 

Michael C. Lens is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. 




​Citations:

Chetty, R., Hendren, N., & Katz, L. F. (2016). The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children: New evidence from the moving to opportunity experiment. The American Economic Review, 106 (4), 855–902. https:// doi.org/10.1257/aer.20150572 
Getter, D. E. (2022). Community Development Financial institutions (CDFIs): Overview and Selected Issues. CRS
Report R47217.
Goetz, E. G., Williams, R. A., & Damiano, A. (2020). Whiteness and urban planning. Journal of the American Planning
Association, 86(2), 142–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1693907
Howell, J. (2019). The truly advantaged: Examining the effects of privileged places on educational attainment. The Sociological Quarterly, 60(3), 420–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2019.1580546 

Orfield, M., & Luce, T. (2012). America’s Racially Diverse Suburbs: Opportunities and Challenges. Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity. University of Minnesota Law School. https://www.prrac.org/pdf/Myron_Orfield_-_ Diverse_Suburbs_FINAL.pdf 

Robertson, C., Parker, P., & Tach, L. (2022). Historical redlining and contemporary federal place-based policy: a case of compensatory or compounding neighborhood inequality? Housing Policy Debate. https://doi.org/10.1080/
10511482.2022.2026994

Schwartz, H. (2011). “Integrating schools is a matter of housing policy”. Shelterforce, March 30. https://shelterforce.
org/2011/03/30/integrating_schools_is_a_matter_of_housing_policy/
Shapiro, T. (2017). Toxic Inequality. Basic Books.

Tilly, C. (1998). Durable Inequality. University of California Press. 







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