MARC's reports emphasize the relationship between socioeconomic polarization and urban sprawl, which results in severe environmental degradation. As the wave of socioeconomic decline rolls outward from the city and older suburbs, tides of middle-class homeowners sweep into fringe communities. Growing communities, facing tremendous service and infrastructure needs offer development incentives and zone in ways that allow them to capture the most tax base. In so doing, they lock the region into low-density development patterns that are fiscally irresponsible, foster automobile dependency, contaminate groundwater, and needlessly destroy tens of thousands of acres of forest, farmland, and fragile lands. These reforms are inter-related and reinforce each other substantively and politically.
Local schools become socioeconomically distressed before neighborhoods themselves become poor.
Hence, increasing poverty among a community's schoolchildren is a prophecy for the community. First, the community's children often become its adults. Second, middle-class families, who form the bedrock of stable communities, will not tolerate high concentrations of poverty in their schools, and frequently depart in search of better educational opportunities for their children. The results can be clearly seen in and around places where there is dramatic flight from the schools. The central city and the declining inner communities of American metropolitan regions struggle under a disproportionate share of concentrated poverty and segregation.