The Democratic Party cannot continue to reap the electoral rewards of the black vote — or embark on a comprehensive revaluation of life at the bottom of the economic scale — without fundamentally reconceiving how it deals with the neighborhoods where many of its voters live.

Steps to reduce the trouble caused by extremely poor neighborhoods include the assertive use of the existing housing voucher programs to move people into “high opportunity communities,” which have poverty rates of 10 percent or less.

The existing voucher program could be expanded to cover many more than the 2.2 million low income families currently in the program.

One problem with proposals like these is that many Democratic politicians view support for a genuine expansion of affordable housing for African Americans as likely to have a negative impact — or at least to be perceived as having an negative impact — on white communities. They see the distribution of resources away from whites to blacks as a form of political suicide.

Even in super liberal, very Democratic Amherst, Mass. – Obama 12,316, Romney 1,872 in 2012 – residents fought bitterly against a proposal to build 26 units of moderate income housing.