Book Reviews MOVING TO OPPORTUNITY:THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT TO FIGHT GHETTO POVERTY, by Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and John Goering. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 305 pp. ISBN: 978–0-19–539284-5 ($19.95 Paper) Reviewed by W. Dennis Keating Cleveland State University From 1994 to 1998, an ambitious social science experiment called “Moving to Opportu- nity” (MTO) was conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). It was designed to test a residential mobility policy allowing poor federally sub- sidized tenants to move from high-poverty (40 percent or more) urban neighborhoods to low-poverty (10 percent or less) neighborhoods, mainly from inner city ghettos to older suburbs. Five cities—Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles—were chosen as the sites for this $80 million program supporting almost 5,000 participating households, mostly black and Hispanic. Participating families were randomly assigned to three groups: first, the “experimental” group that would receive relocation assistance counseling and housing vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods; second, the “comparison” group that would only receive a housing voucher; and third, a “control” group that would continue to receive assistance in the form of a public housing unit. The impetus for this Clinton administration experiment was the Gautreaux program in Chicago, which resulted from the federal courts finding that the Chicago public housing authority had long racially segregated its projects, with the acquiescence of the federal government. In the face of political opposition to desegregation of those projects, an in- novative remedy allowed 7,100 poor households (mostly black) to receive housing vouch- ers to move to rental housing in non-racially segregated neighborhoods, mostly in the older suburbs of Chicago. Over its 22-year history, this experiment drew positive reviews from sociological evaluations that found that the participants found better, safer neigh- borhoods, increased employment opportunities, and better schools, leading children to perform better. Proponents of the MTO experiment hoped that the Gautreaux results could be repli- cated in a more scientific way, which could then lead to a major change in HUD’s rental assistance program. This echoed the Kerner Commission’s 1968 call for a national pol- icy to open up the predominantly white suburbs to minorities living in segregated urban ghettos. In 1974, HUD’s low-income housing policy shifted from a supply side direction (e.g., traditional public housing projects, many of which were in severe decline) to a de- mand side direction. First called the Section 8 program (now Housing Choice Vouchers City & Community 11:2 June 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1540-6040.2012.01400.x C 2012 American Sociological Association, 1430 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20005 220
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Book ReviewsMOVING TO OPPORTUNITY: THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN EXPERIMENT TO FIGHT GHETTO
POVERTY, by Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and John Goering. New York:Oxford University Press, 2010. 305 pp. ISBN: 978–0-19–539284-5 ($19.95 Paper)
Reviewed by
W. Dennis KeatingCleveland State University
From 1994 to 1998, an ambitious social science experiment called “Moving to Opportu-nity” (MTO) was conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD). It was designed to test a residential mobility policy allowing poor federally sub-sidized tenants to move from high-poverty (40 percent or more) urban neighborhoodsto low-poverty (10 percent or less) neighborhoods, mainly from inner city ghettos toolder suburbs. Five cities—Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles—werechosen as the sites for this $80 million program supporting almost 5,000 participatinghouseholds, mostly black and Hispanic. Participating families were randomly assignedto three groups: first, the “experimental” group that would receive relocation assistancecounseling and housing vouchers that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods;second, the “comparison” group that would only receive a housing voucher; and third, a“control” group that would continue to receive assistance in the form of a public housingunit.
The impetus for this Clinton administration experiment was the Gautreaux program inChicago, which resulted from the federal courts finding that the Chicago public housingauthority had long racially segregated its projects, with the acquiescence of the federalgovernment. In the face of political opposition to desegregation of those projects, an in-novative remedy allowed 7,100 poor households (mostly black) to receive housing vouch-ers to move to rental housing in non-racially segregated neighborhoods, mostly in theolder suburbs of Chicago. Over its 22-year history, this experiment drew positive reviewsfrom sociological evaluations that found that the participants found better, safer neigh-borhoods, increased employment opportunities, and better schools, leading children toperform better.
Proponents of the MTO experiment hoped that the Gautreaux results could be repli-cated in a more scientific way, which could then lead to a major change in HUD’s rentalassistance program. This echoed the Kerner Commission’s 1968 call for a national pol-icy to open up the predominantly white suburbs to minorities living in segregated urbanghettos. In 1974, HUD’s low-income housing policy shifted from a supply side direction(e.g., traditional public housing projects, many of which were in severe decline) to a de-mand side direction. First called the Section 8 program (now Housing Choice Vouchers
[HCVs]), this provided poor tenants with a subsidy allowing them to rent privately ownedand managed housing, paying no more than 30 percent of their income. HUD limitedthis to those units that rented for no more than what it termed fair market rents andmet housing quality standards. It was argued that this gave tenants more choice and costthe federal government much less. Even while this policy change occurred, HUD was inthe midst of conducting a major social science experiment to test the impact of housingallowances on tenants, landlords, and local housing markets. This long term experimentinvolved 30,000 participants and 12 sites. Some of its most significant findings were thathousing allowances did benefit individuals, landlords did make necessary repairs to meetrequired quality standards, and there was no significant rent inflation in tight rental hous-ing markets.
This book provides an evaluation of the MTO experiment’s results. Briggs, Popkin,and Goering conducted research in just three of the five sites in 2004–2005: Boston, NewYork, and Los Angeles. They interviewed a random sample of 122 families from all threetreatment groups and then concentrated upon 39 families. In this latter ethnographicpart of the study, their research focused on the experiences and choices made by theseparticipants, many of whom are profiled. There are chapters on moving to safer neigh-borhoods, finding good housing, schools, and work.
There are a number of key findings from this study: most families relocated to saferneighborhoods; girls adjusted to the moves better than boys; there was no evident im-provement in children’s academic performance; few connected socially to their newneighborhoods; many had difficulty finding landlords willing to rent to them; differentparticipants made different trade-offs; different MTO markets offered different rangesof neighborhood opportunity; there were many involuntary moves; real estate brokersrather than counseling agencies helped many find housing; and few found employment.
The authors concluded that three major lessons were learned. First, there is a shortageof affordable rental housing and what exists is much too concentrated in neighborhoodsthat are either highly distressed or vulnerable to decline. Second, instead of a loss ofcommunity, most often, MTO families kept their social worlds centered on kin. Third, forpoor people who have lived segregated lives in dangerous, high-poverty neighborhoods,conventional choice programs offer little room for maneuver.
Today, HUD subsidizes over 2 million households through HCVs. This provides rentalassistance to only about one-fourth of eligible poor households paying more than 30percent of their income. This reflects both budgetary considerations and the shortageof decent, affordable rental housing. Research has shown that often the use of HCVshas not deconcentrated poverty because whether locating in central cities or nearby sub-urbs, all too many recipients are clustered due to their limited choices of housing. De-spite the authors’ call for a national strategy to provide much-needed affordable rentalhousing to allow poor and minority tenants greater choice, the administrations of BillClinton, George W. Bush, and to date Barack Obama have not yet done this. It is hopedthat a national housing trust fund finally approved by Congress in 2010 might in the fu-ture provide at least some of this housing. However, there is the likelihood of strongpolitical opposition in most American suburbs if the federal government was to an-nounce a national version of the MTO program aimed at the dispersion of poor andminority tenants on a large scale. If and when such a policy was to be considered inthe future, this study does provide valuable insights on how it should be designed andimplemented.
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INHERITING THE CITY: THE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS COME OF AGE, by Philip Kasinitz, JohnH. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway. Russell Sage Foundation, 2008.420 pp.
Reviewed by
Jennifer LeeUniversity of California, Irvine
One out of every six Americans between the ages of 18 and 32 are of immigrant parent-age, and among Americans under 18, the figure jumps to one in four. In Los Angeles,Miami, and New York, immigrants and their children account for the majority of eachcity’s population, signaling the growth of the new second generation in metropolitanareas across the country. Focusing on the children of immigrants in New York City, Inher-iting the City tells the story of how today’s 1.5 (e.g., individuals born abroad but migratingto the United States as children) and second generation are becoming American. Basedon a telephone survey of 3,415 young adults (between the ages of 18 and 32) and open-ended, face-to-face interviews with 333 telephone respondents, Kasinitz et al. comparethe trajectories of five 1.5 and second generation groups (Dominicans, South Americans,West Indians, Chinese, and Russian Jews) and three native-born groups without immi-grant parentage (non-Hispanic whites, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans). In a cityas racially and ethnically diverse as New York (where native-born whites are not the major-ity), Kasinitz et al. argue that it makes more sense to compare second-generation groupsto their native-born minority counterparts, rather than compare all groups with native-born whites.
Using this point of reference, the authors find no evidence of “second generationdecline.” In fact, all second-generation groups fare better than their minority refer-ence groups in high school completion rates, meaning that 1.5- and second-generationWest Indians, Dominicans, and South Americans are more likely to graduate fromhigh school than African Americans and Puerto Ricans. Moreover, second-generationChinese and Russian Jews have higher college graduation rates than native-born whites.The second generation is also making their mark in the city’s labor market. Mov-ing out of the ethnic enclaves and immigrant niches that employ their parents,the new second generation has shifted into the service sector, and while this doesnot mean that all have attained middle-class status, it does mean that most havelanded jobs that are an enormous step up from the poorly paid jobs of the ethniceconomy.
While the story about the second generation is one of incline vis-a-vis their minor-ity counterparts, their progress is not uniform. Second-generation Chinese and RussianJews are outpacing Dominicans, South Americans, and West Indians by a wide margin,revealing the vast differences in human capital among the parental generation. Forexample, three-fifths of Dominican parents, two-fifths of South American parents, andone-quarter of West Indian parents did not graduate from high school. By contrast,
well over 90 percent of Russian parents have graduated from high school, and halfhave earned a Bachelor’s degree or higher. Given the immense differences in parentalhuman capital, it comes as little surprise that second-generation Russian Jews surpasstheir Dominican, South American, and West Indian counterparts with respect to ed-ucation and earnings. However, what is puzzling is how second-generation Chinese(two-fifths of whom have parents who have not graduated from high school) have—withinone generation—come to outpace native-born whites and stand on par with second-generation Russian Jews. More illustratively, how does the child of Chinese immigrantworkers who speak little English and toil away in one of Chinatown’s garment factoriesmake it into one of the city’s most competitive magnet schools and ultimately to an IvyLeague university?
The answer, Kasinitz et al. explain, lies in the “differences in group resources” that im-migrant families deploy as they negotiate the American educational system. The authorsposit that working-class families are better able to take advantage of educational oppor-tunities when they have middle-class and professional role models to which they can turnas mobility prototypes. The class diversity among the Chinese combined with dense eth-nic networks link together middle- and working-class Chinese immigrants, providing thelatter with information about how to navigate the American school system through eth-nic channels such as newspapers, churches, and broadcast media. This is how a second-generation child of a Chinese immigrant garment factory worker whose mother is illit-erate “knew” that her child should go to Stuyvesant (arguably the city’s leading magnetschool).
While the authors point to differences in group resources, they shy away from therole of culture, despite the fact that they introduce the possibility that human cap-ital and structural differences affect the “norms,” “repertoires,” and “expectations”of the immigrants and the expectations that they pass to their children. This is amissed opportunity, especially because they devote a chapter of the book to cultureyet chose to focus on language, transnationalism, and religion rather than on com-munity norms and cultural repertories. Here, they could have explained that whileall immigrant parents value education and want their children to do well in andfinish school, the way they frame “doing well” and the expectations of “finishingschool” may vary widely by group. Focusing on the different cultural frames throughwhich immigrant and second generation groups define “doing well” and “finishingschool” may further elucidate inter-group differences in second-generation educationaloutcomes.
This point aside, Inheriting the City is a tremendously ambitious project and masterfulsynthesis of survey and in-depth interview data of a population who will shape New York’s(and America’s) future. The new second generation is armed with a dual frame of refer-ence through which they perceive choices where other native-born Americans (especiallyracialized minorities) perceive constraints; that they are located in two cultures is the realsecond-generation advantage. Moreover, that they have come of age in a diverse metropo-lis like New York also works to their advantage since the city has placed few barriers intheir way to getting ahead. How long this advantage lasts, and whether the advantage dis-sipates more quickly for some groups will be the story for scholars of the next generationto tell.
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URBAN AMERICA RECONSIDERED: ALTERNATIVES FOR GOVERNANCE AND POLICY, by DavidImbroscio. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. 223 pp.
Reviewed by
Marcus L. BrittonUniversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Imbroscio’s book collects and integrates his published essays on urban governance andpolicy from the past decade or so, which have sparked a series of heated debates inthe pages of Urban Affairs Review and the Journal of Urban Affairs. In these writings, hecriticizes both urban regime theory and a diverse variety of policy prescriptions that hedubs “liberal expansionism.” At the core of his critique are two central claims. First, bothregime theory and the various components of liberal expansionism share common rootsin philosophical liberalism. Second, what he calls local economic alternative developmentstrategies (LEADS) offer normatively preferable alternatives that are also more feasiblepolitically than the policy prescriptions offered by regime theorists and liberal expansion-ists. Philosophical liberalism posits an overly rigid distinction between the private andpublic spheres and prizes individual spatial and socio-economic mobility as a core value.Conversely, LEADS such as local public balance sheets and measures aimed at increasinglocal business ownership provide the means to anchor both individuals and economicactivities in specific local communities, while combating both economic inequality andthe hegemonic influence of large corporations.
Imbroscio’s writing style is polemical and provocative. He is at his best when present-ing normative challenges to specific theoretical perspectives (e.g., regime theory) andpolicy prescriptions (e.g., restricted housing vouchers). The book also offers an intrigu-ing vision of urban politics that presents alternatives to familiar conservative and liberalpolicy stances. However, the book does not go as far as one might have hoped in light ofthe debates mentioned above in addressing criticisms of his previously published work,particularly where practical political and economic challenges to the implementation ofLEADS are concerned.
His treatment of regime theory is relatively sympathetic. He argues that while regimetheory provides an adequate explanation for the prevalence of growth-oriented govern-ing coalitions in American cities, its advocates have neglected to provide a thorough cri-tique of the corporate-center development strategies that these coalitions typically pur-sue. Instead, they (especially political scientist Clarence Stone) have thrown their supportbehind education reforms that would merely ameliorate the social consequences of un-even development by facilitating individual mobility. Consequently, regime theory has notgiven as much attention as it should to LEADS and thus to the potential for urban regimesthat are dominated by, for example, small business interests or community developmentcorporations rather than corporate elites. In his view, these shortcomings reflect liberalassumptions about the division of labor between market and state, which help perpetuatecentral-city governments’ dependence on large corporations for the resources that make
urban governance possible. In order to overcome this limitation, regime theory mustcritically engage with “conventional economics,” a phrase he uses a bit too liberally andall too seldom in connection with citations or criticisms of specific economists’ theoreticalor empirical work.
Nevertheless, Imbroscio does offer two specific, primarily normative critiques of neo-classical economic analysis as applied to urban development. First, he argues for broaden-ing economists’ conception of negative externalities and placing a thorough accountingfor the associated costs at the center of local economic development policy. Yet whilehis chapter on local public balance sheets acknowledges the considerable challenges in-volved in measuring such costs, he unhelpfully characterizes these difficulties as primarilya problem of knowledge and data, rather than as a political problem. As critiques of hisearlier writings plausibly suggest, the success of these strategies may depend cruciallynot only on the ability of community development practitioners to marshal evidence oftheir effectiveness, but also their ability to develop relationships with city officials and toconvince them that LEADS advocates are viable coalition partners. The lack of engage-ment with such critiques in the present volume represents a missed opportunity. Second,he argues that a new economic paradigm is needed, which will shift the focus of urbaneconomic analysis from market dynamism to community economic stability. He offers avariety of proposals for promoting local entrepreneurship, maximizing the local impactof investment, and anchoring investment in local communities, many of which are bothprovocative and plausible.
His critique of liberal expansionism takes on a harsher tone. This critique takes aimat a variety of specific policy prescriptions including formal governance arrangementsfor metropolitan regions such as city-county consolidations; redistributive federal poli-cies aimed at ameliorating inequalities associated with uneven development; and effortsto reduce racial and socio-economic residential segregation by promoting household mo-bility (e.g., housing vouchers) or reconfiguring public housing (HOPE VI). In his view,advocates of these policies—liberal expansionists and especially the so-called “dispersalconsensus”—share a contempt for the currently prevailing patterns of residential settle-ment and urban governance in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. While this contemptstems from the historical influence of racist and classist institutions and policies in gen-erating contemporary settlement patterns and governance arrangements, liberal expan-sionists’ focus on this history leads to overzealousness in their efforts to reduce racial andsocio-economic segregation. In particular, they advocate a massive spatial reshuffling ofresidential populations and reconfiguration of municipal boundaries aimed at reducingracial and socio-economic segregation, even at the cost of undermining local control overland use and making highly disruptive interventions into the lives of families and commu-nities. Similarly, their zeal for these policies blinds liberal expansionists to the place-basedalternatives for reducing inequality represented by LEADS. One can—and Imbroscio’scritics certainly have—legitimately question whether any of these policies necessarily im-ply a lack of support for the place-based initiatives he favors and whether the sometimesstrident tone of his critiques is actually conducive to the sort of “conversation” he claimsto want to initiate (p. 178). He does, however, deserve credit for pushing urban scholarsto think more carefully about how policies aimed at fostering less restricted householdmobility and mixed-income housing are likely to interact with policies aimed at place-based economic development and revitalization.
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THE ENVIRONMENTAL CITY: PEOPLE, PLACE, POLITICS AND THE MEANING OF MODERN AUSTIN,by William Scott Swearingen, Jr. Austin: University of Texas, 2010, 273 pp. ISBN: 978-0-292-72181-4 ($50 Cloth).
Reviewed by
James R. ElliottUniversity of Oregon
Under a capitalist system that leaves most land-use decision making to local jurisdictionsdominated by pro-growth coalitions, how does a place become an Environmental City?This is the question Swearingen sets out to answer in his book about the making of Austin,Texas. To evaluate his effort, we first need to know what Swearingen means by the Envi-ronmental City. We can begin with what it is not. The Environmental City is not Nature’sMetropolis or the Unnatural Metropolis documented by environmental historians; theseare older urban centers that derived their wealth and power from the natural bounties ofsurrounding hinterlands and, in the process, became vulnerable to the very landscapesthey so radically helped to transform. The Environmental City is also not the Dual City, In-formational City, or Global City documented by urban sociologists during the 1990s; theseare major urban centers that produce the capacity for economic globalization and, in theprocess, come to reflect its extreme inequalities through a gutting of social contracts andexploitation of new arrivals. No, the Environmental City is a citizen-based effort to pushagainst these forces of urbanization and establish a local beachhead, where creeks, lakes,and public spaces inform how residents imagine and develop their own unique sense ofplace.
Offering Austin as a case of such defiant urbanism, Swearingen promises both a lo-cal history and an informed analysis. Let us start with the history, which is where he isat his best, drawing on local media accounts, public records, interviews, and personalobservation to advance an account that unfolds in roughly four stages. The first stageserves as background and reaches back to the taming of Austin’s iconic waterways, whoseperiodic floods and droughts historically constrained local growth. Once (seemingly) un-der control, these natural features became assets rather than liabilities and encouraged asecond stage of postwar development during the 1960s and 1970s, which simultaneouslycapitalized on and threatened the hills, rivers, and springs that made Austin so attrac-tive to residents and newcomers alike. During this stage, Swearingen explains, Austinitesfaced a critical choice: allow unchecked growth to ruin these natural features, produc-ing a generic space of and for developers’ profiteering; or, band together to articulateand save the town’s unique and beautiful sense of place. Diverse segments of the localgentry rallied around the latter, using the area’s natural features to frame Austin’s futureas an Environmental City. This political frame, or definition of the situation, providedan alternative to business-as-usual development by publicly imagining Austin’s growth asoccurring within, rather than over, the landscape that helped to define it symbolically aswell as physically.
The third stage of Swearingen’s account involves the actual “doing” of this politi-cal frame during the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Through nuanced reporting, welearn how citizen-based coalitions formed and successfully deployed a discourse of“environment versus developers” to organize and institutionalize a Green Machine thatconserved waterways, parks, and open spaces in and around Austin’s urban core. Dur-ing this stage, environmentalists gained unprecedented control of City Council and usedtheir institutionalized power to create local landscapes that residents wanted to protect.In this way, the “environmental meaning” of Austin took form not just as a political dis-course but as a physical landscape that residents could use and enjoy on a daily basis—anexample of how local culture and nature can feedback on one another over time to mu-tual validation. This was the heyday of Austin as the Environmental City.
Currently, however, Swearingen sees Austin as entering a fourth stage of developmentthat reveals both the ups and downs of these earlier accomplishments. On the up side, en-vironmental protection and appreciation of nature have become institutionalized in theform of parks, swimming holes, greenways, planning ordinances, and political networksthat continue to shape residents’ sense of place. On the down side, growth never reallystopped; instead, it moved to the suburbs to surround Austin’s urban core with the kindof placeless spaces that the Environmental City seeks to avoid. (Let’s not “HoustonizeAustin.”) This regional growth has generated larger, more complex challenges that nowrender the environmental meaning of Austin less central to ongoing efforts to guide itsfuture. As such, the discourse of the Environmental City is now being replaced by a dis-course of the Liveable City, which advocates “smart growth” wherein environmentalistsand developers work together to develop “best practices” for neighborhood preserva-tion, new urbanist projects, transportation planning, inner-city infill, energy policy, socialjustice, and the like. Within this expanding web of regionalized concerns, the Environ-mental City becomes a victim of its own success. It creates a place where people wantto live but inadequately curbs growth that this accomplishment attracts to surroundingsuburbs.
At the end of this engaging historical account, the reader is ready for the forceful anal-ysis that Swearingen can now provide. But it never comes. Rather than unpack, refute, orprobe the theoretical implications of the Environmental City’s symbolic decline and re-placement by, ironically enough, a discourse of sustainability, Swearingen concludes witha series of virtual introductions to current city administrators. The underlying point is thatAustin’s “sense of place” will continue to be contested. But after such a tantalizing tale ofstrategizing, counter-strategizing, and cooptation, one hopes for more: if not grand state-ments about the essential causes of the Environmental City’s discursive demise, then per-haps informed discussion about how the age of the Global City has reversed the historiclogic of Nature’s Metropolis. Rather than focusing on how the city exploited the naturalresources of its hinterlands for wealth and power, this discussion might highlight how de-velopers are now cashing in on the defiant urbanism of the Environmental City to extendtheir placeless drive for profit into, rather than from, surrounding areas. Without suchdeliberation, the book ends much like the Environmental City it depicts—intriguing,successful in places, but ultimately incomplete. Whether one views this ending as half-empty or half-full may matter less than the larger questions it raises about people, places,and politics in today’s urban America. For these questions alone, Swearingen’s book iswell worth the read for Texans and non-Texans alike.
