Over the next two weeks, Next City will unroll short profiles of
77 people, places and ideas that have changed cities this year.
Together, they make up our 2012 Disruption Index. Forefront
subscribers can download the Index in full as a PDF, complete
with beautiful designs and graphics by Danni Sinisi. Readers who
make a $75 donation to Next City will have a full-color printed
copy of the Index mailed to them. Poverty tends to concentrate
and reinforce itself. This is no surprise to the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development, which has watched for decades
as its housing projects devolved into pits of criminality and
hopelessness. In the 1990s, the department decided to try
something new. As a sort of test, it launched a program called
Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing that relocated public
housing residents from high-poverty areas to low-poverty areas
to see what would happen. HUD figured this would help bring
people out the downward cycle of poverty. But research published
this year in the jou