Mixed-income development in Chicago helps residential integration but also continues social exclusion.

Over the past two decades, many cities have attempted to tackle urban poverty through mixed-income redevelopment of public housing estates. Using Chicago’s Plan for Transformation as a case study, Robert J. Chaskin and Mark L. Joseph find that efforts to integrate public housing residents into more economically diverse developments actually lead to new forms of inequality and marginalization, rather than well-functioning mixed income neighborhoods. They write that developers are often focused on maintaining the attractiveness and market value of redeveloped communities, which often leads to the adoption of zero-tolerance mechanisms of monitoring and control against low-income residents.