Structural inequality--grounded in racial and class division--has persisted too long in the US, its consequences becoming even more critical as the nation experiences dramatic demographic change. Inequality of opportunity has been framed primarily in terms of income inequality, rather than a focus on the place-based institutions and resources that either promote or constrain opportunity. David D. Troutt, Professor of Law and the founding Director of the Rutgers Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity (CLiME) at Rutgers University, aims to advance public understanding and discourse of structural inequality through the lens of “metropolitan equity.” Metropolitan equity assumes that much opportunity is transmitted through the relative resources of local public and private institutions like schools, health and food access, housing policy and economic development. Profound regional segregation between wealthy municipalities and neighborhoods on one hand and poor areas on the other contribute to continuing cycles of poverty, unsafe environments, and subpar educational quality at the local level. Opportunity hoarding has real consequences for people living in under-resourced communities. Closer scrutiny of the rules governing key local institutions shows chronic inattention to equitable principles. By promoting academic research and engaging not only interdisciplinary scholars but also the public for greater social impact, Professor Troutt hopes to demonstrate that structural inequality is now every U.S. citizen’s problem, and that every community, whether wealthy or poor, must engage policies that advance our best values of healthy personal growth, economic competitiveness, and meaningful democratic participation.

Author of The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America (NYU Press, January 2014), Professor Troutt teaches an interdisciplinary approach to civil rights, public policy and social science that explores legal and cultural assumptions guiding residential organization in metropolitan America. As the director of the Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity, Professor Troutt collaborates with scholars across multiple disciplines, supervises law and graduate students in publicly engaged scholarship projects and works with non-academic organizations to facilitate public discourse about structural inequality and improving institutional opportunity. Ultimately, he hopes to create an active and organic blueprint for understanding institutional rules and arrangements that produce or deny opportunities based on place, and address a number of issues in housing, public health, access to credit, education, transportation and economic planning.

Current projects include:

• Trauma, Schools and Poverty Project: An interdisciplinary research project between CLiME and a university center on violence and clinical psychology demonstrates the scope and nature of trauma-related disorders among school-age populations in three municipalities. According to extensive research, poverty impairs cognitive function due to threats that produce chronic stress and trauma, reducing quality of life and increasing risks for many long-term health problems like diabetes, hypertension, alcohol dependency and drug abuse. By demonstrating how the law obligates public institutions to provide for low-income children struggling with trauma-related disorders, Professor Troutt hopes to advance prevention remedies that involve better school-based and off-site therapeutic interventions while also advocating for broader deconcentration strategies so that children’s environments are no longer incubators for PTSD. The project includes an outreach component designed to engage the public and scholars in an active discourse around the effects of trauma on life prospects and the resources necessary to stop it.
• The Real Costs of Local Democracy: This project is part of a focus on government transparency and, in particular, how veiled practices tend to increase the costs of local public services for the poorest members of certain regions in violation of basic principles of equity. This project will also look at the existence and consequences of infrastructure spending and municipal fee disparities across Northern New Jersey.
• The Causes and Remedies for Achievement Gaps, Especially in Racially Mixed Classes: This project looks at the peculiar dynamic of educational gaps in those rare districts that are nominally mixed, or desegregated, but suffer a lack of integration in higher-level classes and career readiness rates. The growing phenomenon of what Troutt calls “DIMIs” (Diverse, Inclusive, Moderate-Income Municipalities) brings with it the challenge of educational equity, often within the same school buildings. Understanding and ameliorating these gaps in districts that are becoming increasingly representative of American schools is critical for broader growth in the 21st Century.   
• Fair Housing as Metropolitan Equity: The recent focus on fair housing by both the Supreme Court and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development should be understood as a return to basic principles of residential organization that facilitates a broader middle class in the absence of discrimination. Fifty-year-old notions of fair housing have become recognizable as the contemporary emphasis on metropolitan equity. This understanding is key because social and economic conditions have changed dramatically since the inception of fair housing concepts in the 1960s, making the dual priorities of anti-discrimination and spatial inclusiveness even more prescient than previously known.