Enterprise declares that its goal is

to end housing insecurity in the United States within a generation. That means no more homelessness. No more low-income families spending half of their income on housing. No more families living disconnected from opportunity.

LISC, in turn, says, “We help create good places to live, work, do business and raise children.”

Betsy Julian, president of the Dallas-based Inclusive Communities Project, said in an interview that low-income housing developers “make a lot of money, and it needs to be understood that they are really set up on the assumption that we have segregated housing and you have to work with the segregated status quo.” The resulting practices, she said, are “doing serious harm to children.”

Similarly, Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a leading expert on affordable housing, argues that the “poverty housing industry” has “worked with local, regional and state government to preserve the segregated status quo.” In the case of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orfield writes, the poverty housing industry has “sabotaged the nation’s most effective regional-housing integration program.” In a phone interview, Orfield pointed out that policies placing the poor in already dilapidated districts relegated families to environments where there “is no private market” and to regions that are “entirely supported by government.” This spatial isolation from business and from the mainstream activities of American commerce, Orfield argues, effectively locks residents into a life of failure and dependence.

In a phone interview, Rubinger, of LISC, defended his company’s practices. “We are not at all in any way opposed to people moving into areas of opportunity” he said, but added that this practice, in his view, ensured that “the least skilled and least educated are left behind. We need to pay attention to them.”

LISC not only finances housing, Rubinger said, “but we are also investing in education, safety and the arts, all of the things that make healthy, sustainable communities.” Nonprofits like LISC have been crucial to the revival of New York City, Rubinger argues, because they were the only groups willing to put money into housing back in the 1970s, when New York was on the ropes.

Ali Solis, a spokeswoman for Enterprise, wrote in an email:

Enterprise strongly supports investing in both “high opportunity” and distressed communities that are undertaking comprehensive revitalization.

She argues that “creating and preserving affordable housing and building opportunity for residents should not require investing in one kind of community over another.”

A series of recent analyses demonstrate the scope of the concentration of federally subsidized affordable housing in high-poverty neighborhoods, including housing financed through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the largest source of money for such projects.