Sociologist Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores discusses how the concentration of class and racial privilege in gated communities takes place alongside the spatial concentration and confinement of the poor. She argues that gates help sort and segregate people, physically and symbolically distinguish communities, and cement inequality.

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Displays of wealth and opulence in the face of dire need and poverty have become commonplace as the rich and the poor increasingly share city spaces around the globe. Research shows that it is the perception of inequality, more than raw measures of inequality, that has important political consequences and that is most concerning for social well-being. In this article, I propose a theoretical move from a general, statistically driven conceptualization of inequality to a spatially informed concept that recognizes how people experience inequality. Relying on findings that show that the perception of inequality is most important for life chances, I suggest that it is key to understand not only where inequality is located but how it is spatially distributed. Using the Mall of San Juan as an example of a spatially polarized landscape in Puerto Rico, and referring to other cases in Latin America, the article shows how the spatial distribution of inequality highlights the perceptual fields of citizens who may celebrate, succumb to, respond to, attune to, and/or challenge the inequalities accordingly. To shift from an accounting of inequality through the concept of segregation to recognizing the experience and perception of inequality through spatial polarization shifts the scholarly and policy frames of inequality research and policy.

The Puerto Rico Housing Authority was created in 1938 as a consequence of the 1937 U.S. Federal Housing Act. Increased migration to Puerto Rico's urban centers had resulted in overflowing slums. Public housing became the prime solution. In 1964, Luis Muñoz Marín, first Puerto Rican elected governor and the first governor under the formally defined Estado Libre Asociado/Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, outlined the fundamental policies regarding urban housing and renewal efforts. These policies consolidated the main objectives of the public housing program: to destigmatize public housing, to make it transitory, and to promote home ownership. This article overviews the theoretical traditions and aims that have shaped public housing in Puerto Rico, details the policy and design interventions serving these aims, and explores the consequences of such interventions. The focus is on public housing design and placement as shaped by an assumption that the communities would be temporary, and the eventual reality of permanence.

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