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When lawmakers have tried to curb pollution and traffic gridlock through congestion pricing, for instance, charging vehicles a fee if they enter busy urban neighborhoods during peak hours, critics have shot down the proposal by claiming it would hit low-income workers in transit deserts the hardest. In many cases, this is true. But it doesn’t have to be. We allow millions to live paycheck to paycheck, then leverage their predicament to justify inaction on other social and environmental issues. Politicians and pundits inform us, using their grown-up voice, that unfortunately we can’t tax gas-guzzling vehicles or transition to green energy or increase the cost of beef because it would harm poor and working-class families. My point isn’t that these tradeoffs aren’t pertinent but that they aren’t inescapable. They are by-products of fabricated scarcity.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

I feel a little stupid making the case that a child’s environment matters. We know it does, which is why many of us expend so much energy and treasure fortifying our own schools and neighborhoods, hoarding the promise and security that come with them. What are we teaching our children when they plainly see us barring the doors of opportunity for other children—and doing it in their name? America has backslid since Brown, so much so that our children’s schools today are less economically diverse than their grandparents’ schools were, and although we have taken baby steps toward racial integration, most of our communities remain sharply segregated by race as well. As our cities become more unaffordable, the sheer distance separating the haves and the have-nots will only grow wider. We used to gossip about poor families who lived on the other side of the tracks. Now we talk about those who live in the next county over. We remain very separate and very unequal. But this corruption of opportunity can end with us.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

Besides, let’s admit it: Segregation poisons our minds and souls. When affluents live, work, play, and worship mainly alongside fellow affluents, they can grow insular, quite literally forgetting the poor. It brings out the worst in us, feeding our prejudices and spreading moral decay. Engaging with one another in integrated communities allows us to recognize our blind spots, de-siloing our lives and causing families well above the poverty line to become bothered by problems that affect those below it. As Nietzsche wrote, “One must want to experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.” And I’d count poverty among the great problems. Integration means we all have skin in the game. It not only disrupts poverty; on a spiritual level, over time it can foster empathy and solidarity. This is why opposing segregation is vital to poverty abolitionism.

— Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond