ABSTRACT
While the last chapter established that there are differences in the level and structure of inequality across cities and traced these to differences in economic conditions, this chapter digs deeper into the mechanisms that explain why certain conditions result in the outcomes they do. I narrow my focus to Detroit and Dallas, the two cities with the most complex configurations of inequality. The configuration of inequality in one city is the exact opposite of the configuration in the other city, and in neither city is inequality relatively lower on all accounts. Each represents a mix of “good” and “bad” outcomes, and several of these outcomes are not what we would have expected. The political implications of configurations of inequality are therefore significant: there appears to be no easy choice between a low-inequality and high-inequality path of regional economic development. In contemporary parlance, this suggests as well that there is no easy choice between the “low road” and the “high road” of economic restructuring, particularly if the latter is bereft of stringent affirmative action goals. Rather, the weaknesses of each path need to be exposed and addressed in order to have any hope of achieving across-the-board improvements in inequality.
