Here Comes the Neighborhood - NYTimes.com SUBURBIA beckons many poor and working-class families with the promise of better schools, access to non-dead-end jobs and sanctuary from the looming threat of urban violence. But many suburbanites balk at the prospect of affordable housing in their midst. They fear that when poor people move next door crime, drugs, blight, bad public schools and higher taxes inevitably follow. They worry that the value of their homes will fall and the image of their town will suffer. It does not help that the poor are disproportionately black and Latino. The added racial element adds to the opposition that often emerges in response to initiatives designed to help poor families move to suburbs from inner cities. Are the fears supported by facts? A comprehensive new analysis of what has transpired in Mount Laurel, N.J., since 140 units of affordable housing were built in that verdant suburb in 2000, answers with a resounding "no." Families with incomes as low as $8,150 - one-third of the poverty level - have been living in a town where the median income is 10 times higher for a family of four. "Climbing Mount Laurel," co-written by the Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey and several colleagues, concludes that this affordable housing has had zero impact on the affluent residents of that community - crime rates, property values and taxes have moved in step with nearby suburbs - while the lives of the poor and working-class families who moved there have been transformed. In suburbs across America, the houses, schools, swimming pools and golf courses look just like those in Mount Laurel. The socioeconomic backgrounds of their residents are similar as well. Even the names of the subdivisions in Mount Laurel - the Lakes, Laurel Knoll, Tricia Meadows - are familiar in suburbia. So there is reason to believe that what's happening in Mount Laurel can be readily repeated. THE Mount Laurel story begins on a Sunday morning in October 1970, when 60 black residents gathered in Jacob's Chapel, a Methodist church. The parishioners were deeply troubled by the fact that their sleepy farm town was being quickly transformed into a wealthy suburb in which many parishioners could no longer afford to live. They gathered in the chapel to await word on a proposal from a community group to build 36 affordable garden apartments in the center of town. According to those present, the news was not good. "If you people can't afford to live in our town," a township official told the congregation, "then you'll just have to leave." The blunt announcement turned a modest request into a movement that spanned several decades. For 30 years, local officials waged a battle against affordable housing, as "Mount Laurel" came to symbolize the struggle over the socioeconomic integration of suburbia. In "Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia," which my Berkeley colleagues John P. Dwyer and Larry A. Rosenthal and I published in 1995, we chronicled the controversy. It wasn't pretty. Jose A. Alvarez, who was mayor in 1975 when the New Jersey Supreme Court sided with the parishioners in one of the most important civil rights decisions since Brown v. Board of Education, regarded the proposed housing units as a deathly threat. "It's like grafting a good healthy skin so you can graft in cancer skin and blend it in," he told me. As Judge Edward V. Martino, who presided over the first trial in the case in 1971, said to me, township officials "were treating these people like cattle, even calling them the scum of the earth." With the town finding one excuse after another to keep out affordable housing, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a second landmark ruling in 1983. In the decision, known as Mount Laurel II, the justices ordered all New Jersey suburbs to rewrite their zoning laws and allow a "fair share" of affordable housing. But that was hardly the end of it. Not until 1997, after endless planning board hearings, council meetings, and multiple attempts to reach a legislative solution, was the housing development finally approved. David L. Kirp is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of "Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools."