Our founders championed equal opportunity for all, knowing it was not a reality, but understanding that as a driving aspiration, this American Dream could keep us moving forward no matter what the future held. While there will always be a gap between where we are and where we want to be, every generation of Americans must always work to narrow it.

Today the gap is too large and the American Dream is out of reach for too many. Bill Goldsmith and coauthor Ed Blakely have long held that the most effective way to increase opportunity is to ensure that the...

When we publishedSeparate Societiesin 1992, American cities were troubled by failing economies, severe racial segregation, and desperate neighborhood conditions. These problems had preoccupied politicians, social activists, and scholars since the 1960s. We contended that if left unattended, city problems would impair national social and economic life. We looked to the federal government to enable solutions ranging from inner-city revitalization to dramatic changes in welfare and workforce development. Although proposals like ours found their way in whole or in part, by accident or design, into aspects of welfare reform, job training, and urban renovation in the 1990s, for the...

The brief “American Century” of diminishing inequality, the post–World War II decades, finished long ago. Ever since the mid-1970s, global competitors have transformed the nation’s economy and politics, and since the severe downturn of 2008, the nation has faced disintegrating traditions of social solidarity. In the mid-twentieth century there was a common belief that all Americans shared an economic destiny. The wealth of the nation would flow to all citizens who displayed diligence and thrift. This belief lasted perhaps forty years, and then, after four decades of progress, the basic social contract that connects people and opportunities began to...

In the twenty-first century some U.S. metropolitan areas operate from high in the global economic order and others function near the bottom, but they all find themselves zooming up, down, and around, as if they are riding an international roller coaster, constantly ducking obstacles thrown in the way by new contenders from overseas. The Chicago mayor and his economic development director travel to Japan to entice investors, and it will not be long before major U.S. cities have secretaries of foreign affairs, as does São Paulo. Meanwhile, small cities in the southern or midwestern United States propose English-only legislation, fearful...

Poverty is not confined to the lowest-income areas of cities. It has spread across metropolitan regions. In the mid-1990s a representative from Minneapolis to the Minnesota legislature used the wordmetropoliticsto propose expanded regional cooperation. The idea was to form an alliance of the Twin Cities with their inner suburbs—to share the burdens of housing for the poor, coordinate sewer construction, pool tax revenues, even to protect farmers against subdivision pressure. By cooperating with the city, nearby municipalities could marshal forces against the privileged, farther-out suburbs.¹ The notion of metropolitics, pursued perhaps most famously with Portland’s growth boundary...

In the first edition of this book we advocated changes in national policy to deal with the ills of poverty and neglect in urban areas. We wrote in 1992 that there is a potential cycle for change. It begins with the local problem of urban poverty and central-city decay and then moves to local public recognition, which generates a local response. That response is severely constrained and confounded by the exclusionary obstruction of the privileged suburbs surrounding the cities and by a lack of resources and power. In the best of circumstances, the conflict between attempts to deal locally with...