By David D. Troutt

It is a good thing that the 50-year debate over inclusionary zoning ordinances has finally come to Newark. Hundreds of cities large and small have already fought the battle, and the vast majority have decided to enact them--with varying degrees of success and almost none with market-killing failures.

The debate in Newark, where the proposed ordinance is up for a vote Wednesday, signals that a vibrant yet struggling working-class city has gotten the attention of global capitalism and must figure out how to grow into a 21st-century metropolis without losing its identity to economic inequality the way so many others have.

It is a good problem to have. Yet it comes with enormous risks of gentrification and exclusion as the long-time residents of Detroit, Harlem, San Francisco, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Miami and Washington, D.C. have all discovered. Inclusionary zoning is merely one important way to ask two central questions: What is a city and who gets to belong there?

Cities are complicated places characterized by multiplying intersections of culture, people, businesses, public spaces, government agencies, schools, churches and jobs --lots of jobs --that facilitate what one urbanist called "the coming together of strangers."

The world over, more wealth is generated in cities as well as more poverty than other places. More people are moving to cities, as cities become even more important to life chances and social well-being. Yet cities are also places of contested earth where the desire to exclude --along racial, ethnic, economic and political lines -- lives in constant tension with the will to belong. As a result, they are sites of rapid change.

Directing that change is the responsibility of Newark's elected officials, who have only the policy tools of government to regulate the city's economic fortunes on behalf of its current and future residents. Zoning is one such tool, and it is key because land use regulation affects many interrelated aspects of the local economy. Zoning policy, therefore, goes to the heart of deciding what kind of city Newark will be.

The three main arguments against inclusionary zoning tend to follow a list of concerns associated with real estate developers, whose critical investments play an important role in the city's tax base. First, opponents argue that Newark has an immature economy that is still dependent on tax giveaways to developers. Better to let the "free market" dictate development, or risk disincentivizing the investments the city needs.

This speculative argument flies in the face of current trends. Not only is Newark's maturity evident in the recent investments of companies such as Panasonic, Audible, Bates and, of course, Prudential, but the New York metropolitan real estate market is rapidly expanding to Northern New Jersey cities with strong infrastructure like Harrison, Jersey City and Hoboken before it.

A study recently conducted by the Ironbound Community Corporation found that merely having a PATH train stop as Newark does has greatly increased residential rents in the past year. The Central Ward development projects announced by Mayor Ras Baraka in this year's state-of-the-city report document thousands of square feet in new residential and commercial projects downtown. Rather than a free market, most of these projects have received great tax advantages out of public revenues.

Second, opponents argue that it is a tax on private development and therefore costly and unwise government regulation. Further, as a tax, it has failed to produce the inclusive results in some cities that its supporters promised.

Inclusionary zoning is no more a tax than any other kind of government regulation. Yet calling it a tax misconstrues the relationship, as if only business is giving something up. Instead, urban development involves reciprocity between city and businesses. Cities offer infrastructure, police, fire, sanitation, permitting and often grants and tax abatements that protects developers' investments while developers bring development. Newark need not grow as if it has its hand out.

Legally, inclusionary zoning is merely another form of use restriction, just as a zoning ordinance might mandate parking or street setbacks or block the sale of pornography. According to the most recent state court to hear a dispute over San Jose's inclusionary zoning ordinance, the California Supreme Court indicated that inclusionary zoning is zoning. Municipalities have had the constitutional power to zone for almost 100 years.

For the sake of argument, suppose Newark's ordinance could be considered a tax--or an "exaction" in legal parlance. It would still be justified on the grounds that there is an important public policy in zoning for lots of different kinds of people, including local residents with limited incomes.

This is really the heart of the matter. Cities gentrify in part because they do not adequately regulate the supply of affordable housing. Revitalizing markets never do. Therefore, if cities are defined not just by the dynamic interactions within them but also by who gets to interact there, belonging has to be a principle of government regulation.

Inclusionary zoning is a means by which city leadership establishes equitable principles for investors. Dozens of cities that meant well but failed to ensure affordability as a first principle prove that that there is no other way but to act with foresight and clarity. Cities that treat affordability as an afterthought gentrify quickly. Those who set the rules boldly and stand by them see equitable development.

Finally, opponents argue that gentrification cannot occur in the Central Ward because very few people actually live downtown.

This argument misunderstands the way housing displacement works. Gentrification was originally defined as the investment at low cost of development capital in downtown areas with depressed property values; as those areas became more attractive, they sent ripples of new investment activity into surrounding areas until even neighborhoods once deemed remote became "hot"--and expensive.

This is why housing costs are escalating in Crown Heights and East New York, Brooklyn and why California working-class cities like Richmond and Fresno have exploited their "proximity" to jobs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Newark is only 24 square miles, a compact "large city" by national standards, whose available land could be transformed relatively quickly were it to become "hot."

And it's the proximity between downtown and Newark's other wards that has both practical and symbolic significance in this debate. Belonging in Newark cannot become stratified as it is Detroit, where a young white "creative class" lives on an enclosed 7.2 square mile oasis surrounded by an enormous yet bleak African-American periphery where street lights hardly work.

Inclusionary zoning under Newark's proposed ordinance recognizes the need to spread development resources to the surrounding neighborhoods through occasional in-lieu opt-outs and Model Neighborhood Initiative programs. But more importantly, it offers residents from those neighborhoods a path into the very heart of the city's revival.

Often forgotten in these policy debates is that development is not the social glue that defines a city's identity for better or worse. Rather it is its people. Since the Newark Rebellion of exactly 50 years ago, Newark residents have waited patiently for resources to come home to them. It is the city's job to make sure that those resources meaningfully touch as many Newarkers as possible.

David Troutt directs the Rutgers Law School, Newark's Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity