Dream Revisited, The : Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity

A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated?

The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.

Ingrid Gould Ellen is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a Faculty Director of the NYU Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. She is the author of Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (2000) and coeditor of How to House the Homeless (2010).

Justin Peter Steil is the Class of 1942 Assistant Professor of Law and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the coeditor of Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (2009).