President-Elect Obama continues to expand his transition team and confirmed what some suspected earlier this week: integration / segregation researcher Xavier de Souza Briggs of MIT is a lead on the Agency Review Team for the Department of Housing & Urban Development, Federal Housing Finance Board, and Interagency Council on Homelessness Review.

From Change.gov:

Xavier de Souza Briggs is an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. A former Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD, his expertise includes affordable housing, economic development and inequality, environmental sustainability, and civic engagement and collaboration.

This move should encourage advocates of racial, ethnic, and economic integration and is especially exciting for MoveSmart.org - our core concept is largely informed by Prof. Briggs' work:

• His 2007 study "Some of My Best Friends Are...": Interracial Friendships, Class, and Segregation in America analyzed data on social capital to find that those who participate in community based organizations are much more likely to have friendships across racial and ethnic lines. This is part of the reason MoveSmart.org will work to help new community residents quickly and easily meet their new neighbors by automatically connecting them to community based organizations that serve their new neighborhoods. From MIT News' summary of the study, "...Ties across racial lines provide essential ladders to economic opportunity, give people a broader perspective on public issues and expand their sense of self and community. These ties, in turn, help contain conflicts among different racial groups, promote wider access to information and influence, and enhance the ability to work with others to get things done in diverse communities and organizations."
• The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America, edited by Briggs, is a wealth of ideas on policies that might foster equity and build integrated communities. In his concluding essay in the compilation, "Politics and Policy: Changing the Geography of Opportunity", he notes, "In broad terms, expanding housing choices means three things: creating more valuable choices for a wider array of people, protecting those choices from discrimination and other barriers to choice, and enabling the choosers to make the best possible choices for themselves and their families [emphasis in original]" (p. 331). He goes on to explain, "We need to dramatically scale up well-implemented, metropolitan-wide housing mobility programs for low- and moderate-income families" (p. 332).
• Finally, in the spring of this year Prof. Briggs and Margery Austin Turner of the Urban Institute released a comprehensive analysis of the successes and failures of the Moving to Opportunity and Moving to Work demonstration projects at HUD. Our previous post "Risks and Resources" (recommended reading) on this research noted, "This second alternative is at the core of MoveSmart.org’s approach. We believe that every neighborhood is a unique combination of opportunities and challenges - this article terms them “risks and resources”. The trick for ensuring a lasting, integrative, affirmative move is connecting families to “resources” or opportunities they need in neighborhoods with challenges or “risks” they can handle. In the current housing search matrix, this calculation of opportunity and challenge is clouded by discrimination, affordability, and our own ignorance and prejudices."

Soon, MoveSmart.org will be launching a campaign to encourage the new administration to make policies that promote integration a priority, but appointments like this are definitely a step in the right direction.