You can learn almost everything about a city's priorities by looking at what it does with the space between its buildings. In the wealthier parts of our region, that space is generous: trees, setbacks, parks, room to breathe. In the parts where lower-income families actually live, it collapses. Structures crowd together, green space disappears, trash accumulates, and the city's attention thins out to almost nothing. This is not an accident of geography. It is a pattern, and patterns are made by decisions.
My students documented this across Towson, Beltsville, and Jersey City, and what struck me about their work was how visible the inequality became once they started looking. Low-income families are pushed into tightly packed neighborhoods that receive less attention from the city, while higher-income families enjoy more sprawling, low-maintenance areas. The same dynamic plays out in the cities they studied: new technology and modernized buildings arrive, the priority shifts toward attracting higher-income residents, the cost of necessities rises, and longtime lower-income residents are pushed out because they can no longer keep up. We call this "development." We rarely call it what it also is, displacement.
It would be comforting to treat this as the natural, neutral result of market forces. It is not. Spatial inequality is the product of underinvestment, poor infrastructure, and a long history of choices, redlining and discriminatory housing policy among them, whose effects still shape which neighborhoods get the trees and which get the traffic. Markets did not decide on their own to starve certain blocks of investment for decades. People did, through policy. And what policy built, policy can begin to repair.
I want to be clear that I am not arguing against new buildings or new investment. I am arguing about where it goes and who it serves. Governments control funding, zoning, and infrastructure planning, which means they have the direct power to address these unequal patterns rather than deepen them. That means deliberately directing public funding toward the neighborhoods that have been underfunded for generations, not just the ones already on the rise. It means treating health-care facilities, schools, and basic infrastructure in those areas as obligations rather than afterthoughts. And it means using inclusionary zoning to open higher-opportunity neighborhoods, the ones with the good schools and the easy transit, to families who have always been priced out of them.
Reliable public transportation is part of the same fight, even though we rarely frame it that way. When transit is poor, geography becomes a cage: your zip code determines your access to jobs, health care, and education. Expanded, dependable bus and rail systems are not a convenience. They are how you dismantle the barriers that keep opportunity sorted by income.
Here is the part where I will disagree with my own profession a little. Planners and policymakers love comprehensive, capital-intensive, decade-long solutions, and those have their place. But the people living with overcrowding and neglect cannot wait a decade. This is why I have come to believe the most underrated tool we have is the zoning meeting itself. The decisions that produce spatial inequality are made in rooms that the affected residents rarely enter, by people who do not live with the consequences. The fix is not glamorous: it is residents showing up, speaking during the public-comment period, and making the cost of ignoring their neighborhoods politically real. Advocacy is nearly free, the meetings are open, and there is time built in to be heard. It is not a guarantee of change. It is a guarantee of a voice, and that is where change starts.
None of this is easy, and I would distrust anyone who told you it was. Targeted investment requires long-term planning and significant resources. Inclusionary zoning provokes fierce opposition. But the alternative is a region that keeps sorting its residents by income into the spaces it cares about and the spaces it forgets. The gap between the sprawling neighborhood and the crowded one is not a fact of nature. It is a measure of who we have decided a city is for. We can decide again.
This commentary draws on field research and proposals developed by TU MTRO undergraduate students. The opinions expressed are the author's.