Because we were interested in hearing an expert’s opinion on the administration’s proposals, Salon recently spoke over the phone with Paul Jargowsky, who is a professor of public policy at Rutgers University and the author of “Poverty and Place: Ghettos, Barrios, and the American City.” Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Now that you’ve had some time to look it over, what are your thoughts about the administration’s plans to decrease segregation?

I think it’s really long overdue. It’s been something that’s been talked about in a vague way for a very long time, with virtually no follow through since the early days of the legislation.

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So in some sense it’s an attempt to do what should’ve been done long ago?

Think about it for a minute: At the beginning of the big wave for suburbanization, if there had been in that point in time a concerted effort to make sure that all these new communities that developed had a wide range of housing types, we could have in the process of suburbanizing really achieved a remarkable amount of desegregation. At that time, going back to the 1970s, cities were highly segregated, so all you had to do was desegregate the suburbs at that period of time, and you would’ve seen a lot of progress. Instead, we’ve perpetuated segregation by creating mostly white, mostly wealthy suburban enclaves around the major metropolitan areas. It was a real missed opportunity. George Romney — Mitt Romney’s father — was the one person who was really fighting for that. But the Nixon administration did not support him and in fact prevented him from taking steps that would have made a real difference here.

How much of a difference do you think these rules will make?

I certainly think that to the extent that we’re spending public money on these units, they should be done in a way that advances access to opportunity and makes the most effective use of the public dollar. But the biggest story here, in the end, is really the private market and exclusionary zoning, and discrimination also in the private housing market. That’s the big one, and this won’t really change that. I’m certainly in favor of what HUD is doing now with this rule, and I think it will make some difference at the margin, but it’s not a big enough program overall to move the needle very much.