The Smokescreen of
Poverty Deconcentration
Edward G. Goetz
University of Minnesota

Should the deconcentration of poverty be a leading objective of federal housing policy? No.
Deconcentrating poverty is a smokescreen. It camouflages forced relocation of low-income households. What do we mean when we talk about deconcentrating poverty? As it has been implemented
to date, deconcentration has meant manipulating the spatial arrangement of federally subsidized
low-income families to either disperse or dilute poverty. Dispersal is accomplished through (1) pro­viding vouchers to subsidized families who wish to move out of subsidized developments that have
concentrations of poverty, or (2) forcing the movement of subsidized families through the demolition
and redevelopment of their subsidized communities. Dilution is accomplished through redevelopment that reduces the number of low-income subsidized units in a given site and mixing them with
units to be occupied by middle-class households induced into moving in. Thus, although deconcentra­ting poverty has the sound of a sweeping and comprehensive effort, in reality it is much less than that.
In the end, it is simply the spatial rearrangement of federally subsidized low-income households.
Federally sponsored poverty deconcentration initiatives have had this narrow focus, despite the fact
that we can imagine a much wider range of policy options to deconcentrate poverty. For example,
we might mount an assault on the restrictive and exclusionary practices of predominantly a­ ffluent
White communities, but we have not done so at the federal level, nor have we used federal resources
to support state and local efforts in that area. We might otherwise mandate that these exclusionary
communities accept subsidized very low-income households. Such a mandate has never been made,
nor have we used federal resources to support such an approach at the state and local levels. We
could force middle-class or affluent households to move to achieve income mix, but we have not
done so. We could impose restrictions on private-sector housing developers to ensure income mix
wherever they build, but again, we have not done so at the federal level, and we have made no
significant effort to use federal resources to support the few inclusionary housing programs that
exist at the state and local levels.
Readers may argue that these ideas are out of the realm of what is possible politically, no matter
how much they might help to create income mix. I agree. They have not been pursued because
they are political nonstarters, and they are highly unlikely to be pursued in the future for the same
reason. For example, who among you envisions the federal government limiting the mortgage interest
deduction to people who live in mixed-income neighborhoods? Yet, making housing assistance for
very low-income people contingent on income mix is widely advocated. As long as these political

Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research • Volume 16, Number 2 • 2014
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development • Office of Policy Development and Research

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constraints on the grand idea of deconcentrating poverty exist, we will continue to see limited ini­tiatives that have the effect of merely relocating very low-income, subsidized housing residents.
The difference between the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) demonstration program
and the HOPE VI Program is instructive here. MTO was designed to facilitate the voluntary mobility
of very low-income families who wanted to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. No other direct
benefits were forecast as a result of the program other than the improvements to the lives of the
families who participated. The MTO program was defunded in its second year, abandoned because
of opposition from middle-income communities who thought they might be harmed by it. HOPE VI,
on the other hand, was critically different from MTO in two important ways. First, public housing
residents displaced by the program were not guaranteed a move to a low-poverty neighborhood.
Indeed, as the research shows, just the opposite occurred—most families moved to other segregated
and poor neighborhoods. Thus, HOPE VI avoided generating the same backlash from middle-income
communities that MTO produced. Second, HOPE VI incorporated physical redevelopment of public
housing communities, generating a supportive constituency for the program by producing benefits
to property owners, investors, place-based entrepreneurs, large developers, and local officials. Prop­erty owners and investors could capitalize on the latent land value that had been suppressed by
the existence of public housing, and local officials appreciated the increased property values and
decreased service needs in the community post redevelopment. The HOPE VI Program that forced
the displacement even of families who did not wish to deconcentrate lasted for two decades and,
when it ended, it was replaced with a similar program. MTO, which was voluntary and therefore
proceeded without burdening low-income families, was eliminated in 2 years. The fate of these
programs had little to do with how they treated very low-income people and had everything to
do with how they related to nonpoor constituencies.
So, for the sake of accuracy, we need to eliminate the phrase deconcentrating poverty because it
obscures what we are really talking about. Let us call this initiative what it is: relocating poor
people in ways that do not offend or alienate the nonpoor.
Deconcentration programs (including MTO and HOPE VI) have been disappointments, furthermore,
even on their own terms. The record is pretty clear. Years of research on the MTO program shows
that benefits were limited to participants leaving the most extreme conditions of neighborhood
deprivation (Sharkey, 2013). Even then, the benefits they experienced did not extend to income
or economic security. Other participants, on the whole, did not show benefits from the program.
Research from across the country on HOPE VI has also documented a lack of consistent benefits
(Goetz and Chapple, 2010). The pattern of benefits to these families is modest, inconsistent, and
balanced by measurable costs as well. Most important to note in this discussion is that forced relo­cation has failed to result in improved economic security, while undercutting the informal support
networks that the poor rely on. Benefits of relocation tend to be experienced by the subset of families
who were anxious to leave in the first place (Goetz, 2010). Several explanations for why dispersal
has failed to produce the expected results range from an incomplete theory of poverty in the first place
to poor translation of theory into policy and to poor implementation (Goetz and Chapple, 2010).
We call displacement and redevelopment deconcentration, even though most displaced families
simply move to other high-poverty neighborhoods. Very few of the original residents make it back

140 Point of Contention: Poverty Deconcentration

 The Smokescreen of Poverty Deconcentration

to enjoy the benefits of redevelopment. As the Urban Institute reported, the only intervention that
most residents experienced in HOPE VI was the forced relocation from their homes (Levy and
Woolley, 2007).
The only possible basis for calling deconcentration a success is the redevelopment benefits that have
been generated. For example, Bruce Katz has called HOPE VI “the most successful urban redevelopment initiative of the past half-century” (Katz, 2009: 15). Setting aside for the moment that that
is a pretty low bar, one is prompted to ask, “successful for whom?” City officials who wished to
quickly shift large swaths of land into sites of tax revenue generation certainly benefited, as did the
private developers and investors whose renewed interest in the affected neighborhoods coincided
with the elimination of the old subsidized housing communities. The relocated residents have not
benefited nearly so much.
As Sharkey (2013: 175) noted, “…it is time to discard the idea that moving large numbers of families
out of the ghetto can be a primary solution to concentrated poverty.”
Deconcentrating poverty diverts attention and resources away from adequately addressing poverty.
Intervening factors, such as human capital endowments, health, access to supports (including trans­portation and informal social network supports), are not addressed by deconcentration and are pre­conditions for economic mobility. Addressing poverty directly through investments makes better
use of the federal government’s resources in these preconditions rather than forcing a change of
address for very low-income subsidized families.
Regarding mobility, policymakers should focus on enhancing choices, not forcing a particular choice
on recipients of assisted housing. Most of the research shows that the most highly motivated to
move are the ones who experience the most benefits from deconcentration. The role of the federal
government should therefore be to facilitate, to the extent possible, the moves of families who wish
to move, while continuing to provide assistance to those who wish to remain.

Author
Edward G. Goetz is the
Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs and a professor
of urban and regional planning in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the
University of
Minnesota.

References
Goetz, Edward G. 2010. “Better Neighborhoods, Better Outcomes? Explaining Relocation Outcomes in HOPE VI,” Cityscape 12 (1): 5–31.
Goetz, Edward G., and Karen Chapple. 2010. “You Gotta Move: Advancing the Debate on the
Record of Dispersal,” Housing Policy Debate 20 (2): 209–236.
Katz, Bruce. 2009. “The Origins of HOPE VI.” In From Despair to Hope: HOPE VI and the New
Promise of Public Housing in America’s Cities, edited by Henry G. Cisneros and Lora Engdahl.
Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press: 15–30.
Cityscape 141

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Levy, Diane K., and Mark Woolley. 2007. “Relocation Is Not Enough: Employment Barriers
Among HOPE VI Families.” Brief No. 6 (June). Washington, DC: Urban Institute, Metropolitan
Housing and Communities Center.
Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial
Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Point of Contention: Poverty Deconcentration