This is perfectly true. Dispersal is part of the solution. The question is how to do it. It gets tricky because most jurisdictions don't let a free market operate in housing. We have zoning and occupancy rules that have the effect, and often the purpose, of excluding low income housing and therefore poor people from many suburban neighborhoods. Suburbanites come to think of this as the natural way of the world. It's not.
In a free market, poor people (some of them, at least; the ones who want to escape the hellholes) would double and triple up to live in better areas closer to jobs and better schools. A free market would encourage group homes and informal rentals of basements and spare bedrooms. (Strengthening landlord rights would help here.) A free market would let your neighbor turn his house into a duplex and allow developers to build small apartment buildings on suburban cul de sacs. And a free market would NOT have federal, state, and local housing assistance programs that systematically concentrated poor people into big projects in project-heavy parts of town, chosen because they offered the path of least political resistance.
Instead of forcing suburbs to accept Section 8 housing or mandated numbers of low income apartments, let's turn Section 8 and other housing support programs into vouchers, tell poor people to find their own apartments, and get rid of the occupancy rules that prevent three low income families from renting a suburban tract house next door to you.
Dispersal is part of the solution. We have to stop using core cities as dumping grounds.
Nice theory, but the fact of the matter is I sacrificed for more than 30 years to afford to live were I do. I don’t want my neighbor turning his house into a triplex with dozen or so occupants and thus destroying any value to my property.
>In a free market,....
You’re talking Balitmore here, D.C.’s ‘little brother’...not some pie-in-the-sky ‘right-wing’ utopia where Freedom and Liberty exist /s