A Way Out

America's Ghettos and the Legacy of Racism

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by Owen Fiss,

Edited by Joshua Cohen, Jefferson Decker and Joel Rogers

Princeton University Press

Due/Published May 2003, 144 pages, cloth

ISBN 0691088810

After decades of hand-wringing and well-intentioned efforts to improve inner cities, ghettos remain places of degrading poverty with few jobs, much crime, failing schools, and dilapidated housing. Stepping around fruitless arguments over whether or not ghettos are dysfunctional communities that exacerbate poverty, and beyond modest proposals to ameliorate their problems, Owen Fiss offers a commonsensical, if perhaps stunning, solution: give residents the means to leave.

Inner cities, writes Fiss, are structures of subordination. The only way to end the poverty they transmit across generations is to help people move out of them--and into neighborhoods with higher employment rates and decent schools. Based on programs tried successfully in Chicago and elsewhere, Fiss's proposal is for a provocative national policy initiative that would give inner-city residents rent vouchers so they can move to better neighborhoods. This would end at last the informal segregation, by race and income, of our metropolitan regions. Given the government's role in creating and maintaining segregation, Fiss argues, justice demands no less than such sweeping federal action.

To sample the heated controversy that Fiss's ideas will ignite, the book includes ten responses from scholars, journalists, and practicing lawyers. Some endorse Fiss's proposal in general terms but take issue with particulars. Others concur with his diagnosis of the problem but argue that his policy response is wrongheaded. Still others accuse Fiss of underestimating the internal strength of inner-city communities as well as the hostility of white suburbs.

"Fiss sets forth with admirable clarity and rigor an integrationist manifesto for the early twenty-first century. The most striking aspect of his book is the unembarrassed, unequivocal, unblinking manner in which Fiss champions a position that has been in retreat since the mid 1960s. Fiss is boldly and seriously advancing ideas that will be scoffed at by dominant sectors of both the political right and the political left."--Randall Kennedy