How to Grow the Wealth of Poor Neighborhoods From the Bottom Up

Revitalizing distressed communities is one of the biggest and most intractable problems in America today. Whereas concentrated poverty has long been a problem in urban centers and parts of the rural South, today it has spread into the suburbs and across many more parts of the country. Regional inequality has deepened and the middle class has declined.

In a new report titled “Towards a New System of Community Wealth,” researchers Ross Baird, Bruce Katz (currently my colleague at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where I hold the yearlong Philadelphia Fellowship), Jihae Lee, and Daniel Palmer lay out a potential solution. They define community wealth as “a broad-based effort to build equity for low-income residents,” which could unlock “hundreds of billions in market and civic capital” to revitalized struggling places across America.