In response to Chris Powell’s recent op-ed titled “A soccer stadium won’t rescue Bridgeport. It needs more middle-class housing,” I find myself compelled to provide some much-needed context and challenge some of the undertones and assumptions.

Powell, who paints urban blight as a product of budgetary “mismanagement,” can perhaps benefit from a history lesson on the policies that gave rise to the suburbs. Policy deliberately created winners and losers, subsidizing the suburbs with enormous federal funds to build infrastructure to enable flight from cities.

At the same time, residents were locked out of the newly created suburbs based on their race. As the privileged classes left, so did employers and their tax revenue, leaving massive vacant — often polluted — parcels of land behind.

Jobs that remained were increasingly concentrated downtown, where large office towers were created with adjacent parking facilities and highway connections to service these suburban commuters. According to American Community Survey estimates, Hartford’s population surges by as much as 40,000 during the day. The workers make their livings in downtown facilities, utilizing city services and infrastructure in the process, then take their wages home with them to the suburbs where their property taxes fund schools. Compounding this, large swaths of these downtown areas are not taxable based on current zoning and usage — which makes the budgetary math quite difficult.

Powell points to some other development projects that he considers to be parallels, insisting that they failed to uplift their surrounding populations and economies. Yet no one is suggesting that individual development projects, whether stadiums or indoor arenas, can alone reverse the fortunes of a city. They are usually part of larger development strategies that include investment in infrastructure and additional commercial or residential development.

Hartford’s Dunkin’ Donuts Park, one of the examples he cites, has in fact spurred additional development with more on the way. The Downtown North project will see additional development of housing — market-rate and otherwise. And I wonder if Powell knows that according to the ACS estimates, those moving to downtown Hartford are in fact disproportionately young and educated — the cohort he is most concerned with attracting.

Powell is principally concerned with making cities like Bridgeport a more palatable place for the middle classes to live and play. And while this can certainly spur retail and tax revenue, what would it mean for the population that is already struggling to afford housing and services?

I am especially troubled by the contrasting of Hartford’s “bad demographics” with suburban populations’ higher income earners and “well-parented” children. I have worked at social service non-profits in both Bridgeport and Stamford, and I can assure you that the only difference between a parent in Bridgeport and one in a privileged suburb is the resources available to their local school — not their level of engagement with their children or their skill as a parent. Assigning worth to someone simply because of their household income is anathema to me, and I hope it is to my neighbors as well.

I am a harsh critic of the relationship between private developers and municipal government, but using this soccer stadium as a springboard to drag entire cities and their current dwellers through the mud is insulting. Bridgeport may not need a soccer stadium, but it does need tax paying land uses and short of making suburbanites pay for the costs of their lifestyles, cities are forced to play the zero-sum game of land development and chase every single project they can.

A new stadium for a minor league soccer team in Bridgeport is better than an abandoned and non-tax-paying former greyhound racing track unless we are willing as a society to reorder how we apportion the fruits of our labor. Perhaps, instead, we should refuse to spend any money — state or municipal — on subsidizing the infrastructure needed to make the suburbs viable at the expense of our most vulnerable neighbors.

Chris Seeger lives in Brookfield. His views are his alone.