Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating Its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequalities

Abstract

To account for the extensive inequalities manifest within urban (or metropolitan) areas in the United States, the idea of “opportunity hoarding” has garnered increasing salience. When applied to explain urban inequalities, the focus of opportunity hoarding is on places—especially how residents of affluent, predominantly White residential neighborhoods or political jurisdictions are able to secure a plethora of opportunities for themselves and especially their children, at the expense of those living in less privileged places. I interrogate the account of American urban inequalities embedded within the idea of opportunity hoarding, finding it to be limited in significant ways. In light of these findings, I discuss what a superior account of urban inequalities might look like, and suggest how this account points toward potentially more efficacious strategies to attack these inequalities, perhaps ushering in a more just future for American cities and metros.

Keywords:

• Opportunity hoarding
• resource hoarding
• urban inequality
• urban policy
• community wealth building

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go to James DeFilippis, Preston Quesenberry, Rich Schragger, Ron Vogel, and especially Zelda Bronstein and Ed Goetz, for generously offering helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a sampling of recent literature employing the idea, see Acevedo-Garcia et al. (2020), Anderson (2010), Cashin (2021), Freemark et al. (2020), Gordon (2019), Hacker et al. (2022), Lens and Monkkonen (2016), Massey (2007), Reeves (2017), Rury (2020), Rury and Rife (2018), Sharkey (2019), and Steil (2022).

2 See Massey and Rugh (2021, pp. 161, 183), who document how “within metropolitan America … whites and Asians benefit disproportionately from the increasing spatial concentration of affluence ….” They report that, by 2010, the average affluent Asian lived in a neighborhood that was 50.5% affluent, while the same figure for affluent Whites was 45.3%.

3 Defined as census tracts where 80% or more of the population is White, with median incomes of at least $125,000.

4 On the persistence and pervasiveness of contemporary White flight, see Kye (2018), Lichter et al. (2015), and Orfield and Stancil (2018).

5 Note that some policy designs spawned from the opportunity paradigm are structured in ways that explicitly acknowledge and take account of this reality. For example, the designers and implementers of the now legendary Gautreaux program in Chicago—which established the model for the federal Move to Opportunity (MTO) experiment as well as, arguably, most efforts to use the entry pathway to reduce opportunity hoarding (see, e.g., Anderson, 2010)—very self-consciously attempted to limit the number of Chicago public housing families moved to any single neighborhood for this exact reason (see Fiss, 2003; I thank Ed Goetz for this point; see especially Goetz, 2018).

6 Defined by the qualification for free or reduced-price lunch (see Schwartz, 2011).

7 See, for example, Curto, Fryer, and Howard (2011), Duncan and Murnane (2011), and Ravitch (2010).

8 For example, “greater college enrollment” was one the key findings of the so-called “Chetty Study” (that finally showed some positive results from the 1990s Moving to Opportunity experiment; see Goetz, 2018, p. 45)—a piece of research much trumpeted by those seeking to lessen opportunity hoarding (see, e.g., Anderson, 2010; Cashin, 2021).

9 As Richard Florida (2016) reports, the share of American families living in middle-class neighborhoods dropped from 65% to 40% between 1970 and 2012, while the share living in either all-poor or all-affluent neighborhoods increased from only about 15% to over a third.

10 See https://democracycollaborative.org/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Imbroscio

David Imbroscio is a professor of political science and urban affairs at the University of Louisville. The author or editor of six books, including Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy (Cornell University Press), he is a past recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Award for Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activity at the University of Louisville. His most recent work appears in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and the City; Urban Affairs Review; and the Journal of Urban Affairs.