Bringing Institutions Into the Opportunity Hoarding Debate

David Imbroscio’s “Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequalities” takes issue with the recent scholarly attention given to the concept of opportunity hoarding. Imbroscio worries that opportunity hoarding accounts of metropolitan inequalities place too much emphasis on the role of education and unequal patterns of consumption while ignoring the growing weakness of labor power vis-à-vis capital and the extreme concentration of capital ownership at the top of the wealth distribution. In this comment, I argue that Imbroscio downplays the importance of the institutions that generate metropolitan inequalities in the US. Imbroscio dismisses the two institutional processes that contribute to opportunity hoarding (barriers to the entry of people and the exit of resources) without providing a complete account of how the institutions of homeownership and fiscal decentralization work together to erect barriers to entry and exit. To dismiss entry and exit as solutions to opportunity hoarding without assigning blame to the institutions that stand in the way is to miss the forest for the trees.