On Thursday, I had an opportunity to see 21 MACDC members in the course of 14 hours. It was a long day, but extraordinarily exciting and reinvigorating as my travels and meetings reminded me why I love this job.

I left my house at 6:40 AM in the pouring rain to attend the Greater Gardner CDC Annual Breakfast Meeting. I joined the 60+ guests a bit late, but was able to hear about the many terrific programs they offer from after-school tutoring, to small business development to affordable housing.  I learned that the CDC is able to build its housing with students from Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical High School who provide the CDC with high quality and free labor while the CDC provides the students with valuable learning opportunities.

I left Gardner at 9:00 to drive to Ware for the Western Massachusetts Community Development Collaborative meeting. Thankfully, it had stopped raining as I drove along beautiful country roads and through small towns like Barre and Hardwick. Seven of our members were at the meeting and they provided each other with updates on their many activities. I learned how our members are helping small businesses recover from Huricane Irene's floods, providing supportive housing to low income residents, struggling with scattered site property management, repairing roofs destroyed by the tornado, and supplying fresh frozen vegtables to the Holyoke Public Schools.

At 12:00, I got back in my car and drove to Boston where twelve of our members were scheduled to meet with the new director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, Peter Meade. Each CDC provided Peter with a brief summary of their current priorities and again I heard about a vast array of community improvement efforts. I heard about foreclosure counseling efforts, housing developments, commercial real estate projects, small business development, housing for the homeless, public transit, partnerships with schools, and public safety efforts. Peter expressed his admiration for their work and we discussed how the BRA and the CDCs can strengthen our existing partnerships.

After a brief visit to my office, I returned to my car at 5:30 to drive to Quincy for the 30th anniversary celebration of the NHS of the South Shore.  This 10 mile drive took almost as long as the 60 mile drive to Gardner in the morning as the Southeast Expressway was jammed. So by the time I arrived the hotel ballroom was packed with over 125 guests who had come to celebrate with the NHS. Rob Corley presented a wonderful new video that highlighted how the NHS helps families with foreclosure prevention, housing, and home repairs. I also learned about their close partnership with many local organiations in Quincy, Brockton and 23 other cities and towns.

As I drove home I recounted the many things that I had heard that day. It reaffirmed my admiration for the people who work on the front lines of this movement and reminded me how lucky I am to have an opportunity to play a small role in helping them to succeed. I arrived at my house at 8:40.

Later, as I set my alarm for 5:30 AM and turned out the lights, I began thinking about all the things that I wanted to do in the office the next day. I was happy to know that I could take the Orange Line to work and skip all the traffic - and even happier that I did not have any meetings scheduled for Friday.

In an effort to bring greater attention to the persistent racial and economic segregation in Massachusetts, the Kirwin Institute  published a report in 2009 called the Geography of Opportunity: Building Opportunity in Massachusetts. The report documents the high level of racial and economic segregation that persists in our state and that people of color are much more likely than white people to live in areas of concentrated poverty, which the Kirwin Institute calls “low opportunity” communities. The report provides important insight into residential housing patterns in our Commonwealth, and provides a tool for documenting how certain investments are either improving the situation or making it worse.

While concentrated poverty and racial segregation are serious problems, I believe the report is flawed and potentially counter-productive.  So I was troubled to learn, at a recent meeting in New York hosted by the Ford Foundation, that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is considering the development of its own “opportunity score” for each community in America. HUD hopes to use these scores as part of a comprehensive revamping of their fair housing agenda and strategy to ensure that housing and other policies do not contribute to further concentration of poverty and racial segregation.

This is a worthy goal, so why do I fear that such maps may take us in the wrong direction?

First, the notion that a single measuring device, no matter how many data points are used, could fairly evaluate the opportunities available in every community in America is absurd on its face. The United States is home to thousands of communities – each one unique and valuable in its own ways. A single homogenized score that averages dozens of statistics into a single number obscures that truth.

Second, our country is home to millions of different households with unique individuals seeking different opportunities. Young adults want something different than senior citizens; families with children have different priorities than those without; artists may seek different communities than scientists or farmers. People want and need different things so creating a single measurement for “opportunity” is impossible and inappropriate.  (By contrast, Wider Opportunities for Women developed tailored their "self sufficiency standard" for different types and sized families.)

Third, let’s look at the Kirwin Institute methodology. They use 16 data points to create an overall assessment of a particular community’s “opportunity.” Six of those are various measures of poverty; several others relate to school achievement (which we know is highly correlated with poverty) and others relate to economic opportunity and crime. This provides a clear guide for how a community can improve its score - push out (or keep out) low income families with children. This is by far the single best way for a community to improve its opportunity score. Perhaps more troubling is what the Kirwin Institute left out of its methodology – museums, public transit, affordable housing, after school programs, youth programs, grocery stores, local businesses, higher education, day care, senior citizen centers, parks. Don’t these things offer opportunities too?

Fourth, If HUD adopts a similar approach, the scores will take on even more importance. Local governments could devise policies to lift their scores, real estate brokers could use them to steer homebuyers; bankers could use them to guide loan decisions; insurance companies could use them to set premiums; developers could review them when making investment decisions. Opportunity mapping would make redlining – formal and informal - much easier!

I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing wrong in neighborhoods with high rates of concentrated poverty, high levels of crime and “bad” schools (how we define bad schools could be the topic of a yet another article!)  We should draw attention to those issues. But if we want to highlight communities with high rates of crime then let’s call them “communities with high rates of crime.” If we want to identify low income neighborhoods, let’s call them “low income communities.”  Those are specific and factual statements. But “opportunity” is far too complex and subjective for the Kirwin Institute, HUD or anyone to fairly and accurately label every community in America.

A few years ago, community developers began rethinking their neighborhoods by looking at their assets not just their needs. The idea of “asset based community development” was built on the idea that our communities have assets that should be developed rather than simply needs that need to be served. Opportunity mapping undermines that effort by ignoring those assets.

And perhaps the most dangerous impact that these maps could have – especially one created by the Federal Government – is that they will devastate efforts to entice middle class people back to our cities, something that is vital to addressing racial and economic segregation. In fact, these maps will encourage even more white flight from our Nation’s cities. Having the Federal Government declare a community as "low opportunity" is a sure fire way to encourage middle class families – whites and non-whites – to get out of town.

The notion that the path to opportunity lies in the suburbs is a big part of the reason we have seen racial segregation persist over so many decades. Why would we want to join that chorus?