Remarks prepared for "Fighting Inequality: Leveraging Opportunities for Innovation," Project on Municipal Innovation, September 24, Harvard Kennedy School.

I told a colleague I was going to give a talk about inequality, but that I had to do it over dessert, and I wasn't sure how that was going to go over. She said, "It's perfect … let them eat cake."

Ben and Steven and the good folks at Living Cities invited me here tonight because inequality is a key theme of your gathering over the next day.

And inequality, particularly in big cities, is something that's been a bigger part of the national dialogue over the past few years, probably starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Soon thereafter in 2013, there were a series of elections across many of your cities where the issue of inequality, and what mayors should do about it, was a big part of the debate. New York, Minneapolis, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and others.

This was no straw man issue. Inequality is indeed high and rising in many American cities.

San Francisco seems to be the quintessential example, and with good reason. The Chronicle ran a piece a couple weeks back entitled, "San Francisco's strange detour from paradise to parody." It quoted a longtime resident of the Mission District, ground zero for the city's gentrification:

"I live one block away from Valencia Street, where there's a new restaurant that opens up every 15 minutes. How many chocolate shops does Valencia need?"

About a one-bedroom apartment in the Mission advertised for $6,800/month: "I did the math: $80,000 for rent for a year? You could buy three houses in Buffalo."

But these absurd stories and my previous work on inequality weren't really the impetus for my talk, or for the conversations you'll have tomorrow.

Rather, I think what drove this focus was the events that unfolded in Baltimore back in April and May, which came in close proximity to others in Ferguson, Mo.; in Staten Island, N.Y.; in North Charleston, S.C.

The obvious common thread was the tragic death of an African American male at the hands of police … and the tensions they exposed between minority communities and law enforcement, bred in part by a long history of misguided criminal justice practices and policies.

You can see this tension in the words of West Baltimore residents quoted in the Baltimore Sun during the days of the unrest. Here are a few:

– Resa Burton, a lifelong West Baltimore resident: "They killed a man, but it could've been me! It could've been me! It could been my brother, my nephew! It could've been you!" – Vaughn DeVaughn, a city teacher: "This is about anger and frustration and them not knowing how to express it." Author Alan Berube Senior Fellow and Deputy Director - Metropolitan Policy Program – Sandra Almond-Cooper, president of the Mondawmin Neighborhood Improvement Association: "These kids are just angry," Almond-Cooper said. "These are the same kids they [meaning the police] pull up on the corner for no reason."

These are the very real, very raw surface issues that Freddie Gray's death—and Michael Brown's, and Eric Garner's, and Walter Scott's—exposed.

Several weeks after the unrest, a video team from Brookings went to West Baltimore, and talked to a number of young people. I highly recommend the video, you can Google "Brookings Baltimore" to find it. Here were some of the quotes from the young people in that video:

"Within my community, everything is divided. You have one community, and you cross the street, into a complete other community where the poverty, and the neighborhood, and the people are completely different, even though we're just five minutes away." "Where I live, you've got houses that are boarded up, and have trash." "Everything is still segregated, opportunities are different, kids aren't allowed to go to certain schools, if they do, they won't feel comfortable, they'll feel like outcasts in those schools." "Educational opportunities in my neighborhood are poor."

It was those underlying issues, issues that lie at the confluence of race, place, and opportunity in America, that motivated a colleague and I (a Baltimore resident) to write a piece in the wake of the unrest.

We called it, "Good fortune, dire poverty, and inequality in Baltimore: An American story." The title was more about the art of search engine optimization than anything else.

But we wrote it in part as a response to the emerging narratives in the media about the deeper structural issues in Baltimore that fueled the unrest. Narratives like:

– Baltimore is "The Wire." It's "Homicide: Life on the Street." It's a dangerous city overrun by crime and the drug trade. Or