Sufficiency, and the MTO Program

Despite the substantial decline in the degree of racial segregation in the U.S. housing market reported in the 2000 census, most African Americans still reside in communities that are geographically separate from those of white Amer-icans.1 Continued racial disparities in income, education, and employment mean that housing segregation is accompanied by the concentration of poverty and high rates of joblessness in predominantly black neighborhoods. The concentration of black households in older, predominantly inner-city neighborhoods, coupled with the continuing decentralization of employment within metropolitan areas, reduces the access to jobs of low-skilled inner-city residents. Lack of access is compounded by public transit systems that do not facilitate reverse commuting and by low rates of automobile ownership among poor minority households. This “spatial mismatch ” between the locations of low-skilled jobs and the residences of low-skilled workers has been a focus of labor economists since the late 1960s.2 During the 1980s, concern with the employment effects of residential seg-regation was subordinated to a more general concern with the external effect