Institute on Race and Poverty

THE INSTITUTE ON Race and Poverty (IRP) is a research institute based at the University of Minnesota, which has the aim of investigating “the ways that policies and practices disproportionately affect people of color and the disadvantaged.” The IRP has a staff of 10 and is led by the Fesler-Lampert Chair in Urban and Regional Affairs. Its goals include ensuring that people have access to opportunity and helping the places where people live develop economically to provide opportunities while maintaining social stability. Issues investigated include metropolitan equity, concentrated poverty, and urban sprawl.

The IRP was founded in 1993 by legal scholar Professor John A. Powell, who had personal experience of the research agenda as a young person. Powell's research has shown him that the causes of racial segregation, of clustered poverty, and of disparities in treatment of people of different races are structural in nature, that is, “What these disparities have in common is that they are rooted in laws and policies that disadvantage people of color and over-advantage whites. They simply cannot be explained by racial animosity on the part of whites nor by bad choices made by people of color.”

In other words, only legal change will make any significant difference in the level of inequality and, therefore, charity and kindness, though it is to be valued in its own right, should not be confused with genuine solutions to problems, but might even work to obscure real causes and hence be counterproductive. Powell is prepared to make his case in the national media and to apportion blame for what he believes are ills in American society, and this has, inevitably, caused him to become a target for some of those who do not share his views. Powell left to join the Kirwan Institute and his position was filled by Myron Orfield.

The IRP now organizes a variety of research projects thematically linked to its core goals and is also involved with conference management and information dissemination. In 2005 the IRP jointly authored a report entitled “Segregation of Opportunities,” which helped to demonstrate in the Chicago area that housing location has a distinct impact upon access to opportunities and that housing location is affected by ethnicity.