Moving Communities to Opportunity
Moving Communities to Opportunity: Exploring Public Housing Redevelopment as a Strategy for Addressing Structural Barriers to Economic Mobility
Project Summary
Income inequality and the geographic concentration of poverty have increased dramatically in recent decades, leading to notable inequities in individuals' access to community resources that support human development. Concentrated poverty is particularly acute in public housing developments, home to 1.2 million Americans. As such, policy makers have turned to public-private partnerships to redevelop public housing developments into mixed-income communities, with the presumption that such economic mixing will improve the physical environment, life chances, and economic mobility of low-income residents by drawing amenities to the area, improving access to social and political capital, decreasing physical decay and crime, and stabilizing communities. But limited evidence of the realization of these goals is available. To fill this gap, this project uses rigorous quasi-experimental methods to evaluate the effects of the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI public housing redevelopment policy, evaluating whether redevelopment of public housing into mixed-income developments affects concentrated disadvantage, the availability of resources, and the prevalence of stressors in the community, and whether such effects vary based upon the demographic characteristics of public housing sites.
Approach
We created a unique integrated dataset, including data on public housing drawn from HUD’s “Picture of Subsidized Households” database, data on HOPE VI grants drawn from the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities (NIMC) Mixed-Income Database, and neighborhood data drawn from the Decennial Census, the American Community Survey (ACS), the Economic Census, ZIP code Business Patterns, and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). We are analyzing data using a new flexible conditional difference-in-differences estimation model with the flexpaneldid toolbox in Stata, developed to conduct causal analysis of treatments with varying treatment durations and start dates.
Key Findings
Results found that the HOPE VI public housing redevelopment policy led to declines in neighborhood poverty and increases in median household income but not to increases in the proportion of affluent neighbors in HOPE VI census tracts versus matched census tracts including public housing not redeveloped through HOPE VI. These results were driven by HOPE VI redevelopment in the highest poverty and majority Black neighborhoods. In contrast, we found limited effects of HOPE VI on the racial makeup of neighborhoods, and no effects on the availability of neighborhood resources including institutional resources, social services, or commercial services.