The Bay State’s older industrial cities are suffering from weak housing markets and high concentrations of poverty. So does it really make sense to “fix” these cities by adding more and more affordable housing units? MassINC senior research associate Benjamin Forman poses the question in Sunday’s Boston Globe.

Among the unintended effects of current housing policy:

Adding this supply [of new affordable units] without stimulating new demand can contribute to further market weakness and the concentration of low-income families in high poverty areas. School enrollment figures give some indication of the degree to which poverty has become increasingly concentrated in these older industrial cities. In the last 15 years, the percentage of students classified as low-income in urban schools outside of Greater Boston has grown from less than half to nearly two-thirds.