Can transforming neighborhoods help kids escape poverty?

Summary

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Planet Money: "Can transforming neighborhoods help kids escape poverty?"

Host: NPR
Date: January 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates whether transforming impoverished neighborhoods can provide a pathway out of poverty for low-income children. NPR’s Keith Romer and Greg Rosalski explore the federal Hope VI (Hope 6) program, which rebuilt public housing projects around the country, and discuss new research led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. The episode interrogates whether revitalized, mixed-income neighborhoods help lift children out of poverty—and if so, why.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hope VI Program: Background and Legacy

• Personal Narrative Start [00:43]: Ysena Williams recounts witnessing the demolition of Cambridge Plaza, a public housing tower in North Philadelphia.
• Lived Experience: Ysena describes her childhood in Richard Allen Homes as "depressing," unsafe, and plagued by environmental hazards such as lead paint.
  ↳ “So we had lead, the paint was chipping… it just wasn’t bright. It wasn’t happy.” – Ysena Williams [02:25]
• Hope VI’s Purpose [01:29]: Initiated in the early 1990s, Hope VI sought to demolish and rebuild some of the nation’s worst public housing, creating mixed-income, safer, and better-integrated neighborhoods.

2. The “Neighborhood Experiment” [03:24–04:15]

• A Natural Experiment: Not enough funding for every project led to some old projects remaining and others being transformed, creating a large-scale, unintentional experiment in neighborhood effects.
• Crucial Question Raised: Can investing in neighborhoods and making them economically mixed actually help kids escape poverty?
• Study Introduction: Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his team gathered data on over a million families in public housing from the past three decades.

3. Raj Chetty’s Study & Findings [04:15–13:24]

• Key Paper: "Creating High Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the Hope 6 Program" – Raj Chetty [04:20]
  • Chetty describes the evidence as “very compelling.” [04:37]
• Data Access: More than a million families tracked over decades, assessing outcomes for adults and their children.
• Main Results [12:27]:
  • While adults saw little change, children benefited substantially from growing up in a revitalized, mixed-income Hope VI neighborhood.
  • “You ended up earning about 50% more if you grew up from birth in one of these places… than if you’d grown up in the exact same place pre-revitalization.” – Raj Chetty [12:56]
  • Other positive effects: higher college attendance, lower incarceration rates for boys.

4. Addressing Selection Bias and Causality [14:08–17:46]

• Potential Issues:
  • Critics suggest selection bias: were “revitalized” Hope VI residents systematically different (more motivated, etc.)?
• Methodology:
  • Used “dosage effect”: The longer a child spent in Hope VI, the higher their adult income. Each year in Hope VI increased adult earnings by ~3%. [16:18]
  • Sibling Comparison: Compared siblings who lived different durations in Hope VI—those who arrived younger fared best.
    ↳ “The younger sibling should earn more later in life compared to their older sibling… That’s exactly what we find in the data.” – Matt Stager [17:09]

5. The Mechanisms: Why Do Mixed-Income Neighborhoods Work? [17:48–22:35]

• Not All Hope VI Sites Worked: Kids only benefited if the development was near more affluent neighborhoods.
  • “If surrounding neighborhoods were poor…Kids in Hope 6 development saw no gains.” – Greg Rosalski [19:17]
• Social Integration is Key:
  • Evidence showed Hope VI kids were more likely to connect with higher-income peers on social media and in adulthood.
  • “It’s not the architecture…it’s like who you’re interacting with.” – Keith Romer [20:24]
• Why Do Connections Matter? Raj Chetty outlines three possible mechanisms:
  1. Job Networks: “If you’re connected to somebody who’s got a good job…you’re more likely to get that job.” – Raj Chetty [21:20]
  2. Information/Exposure: “If you live near somebody whose parents went to college, you might be more likely to think about applying…” [21:41]
  3. Aspirations (Most compelling to Chetty): “People’s aspirations…are greatly shaped by who they’re around.” [22:00]

6. Limitations and Policy Implications [25:13–27:55]

• Hope VI’s Controversial Legacy:
  • The program ended over a decade ago and drew criticism for destroying more units than it rebuilt—displacing many families.
  • “Our analysis definitely does not…endorse Hope 6 as a program. I think concerns around displacement should be taken very seriously.” – Matt Stager [26:01]
• Scalability & Next Steps:
  • Economic segregation is growing. Over half of low-income neighborhoods remain as isolated as the old pre-Hope VI projects.
  • “We could be spending the $70 billion a year on affordable housing programs more effectively.” – Raj Chetty [27:20]
  • Broader relevance: Schools, sports, and mass transit can also foster the crucial higher-income/low-income connections identified.

7. Voices from the Neighborhood: Ysena’s Perspective [28:03–29:59]

• Ysena’s Son: Grew up in a revitalized Hope VI development; attended Penn State, pursued trade school, and now has a steady job and future prospects.
• Neighborhood Impact:
  ↳ “Well yes, they will [succeed] because…you’re coming from a mentality where you’re caged in, where now you’re not. So, yes, I do agree, yes, they will make more. They will succeed. Yes.” – Ysena Williams [29:45]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “If you have more high income connections as you’re growing up…you yourself are more likely to rise out of poverty.”
  – Raj Chetty [07:57]
• “You can’t move everyone to a different neighborhood.”
  – Raj Chetty [08:34]
• “It’s not the architecture per se that generated these gains.”
  – Matt Stager [20:29]
• “People’s aspirations and what they try to achieve…are greatly shaped by who they’re around.”
  – Raj Chetty [22:00]
• “Concerns around displacement should be taken very seriously.”
  – Matt Stager [26:01]
• Personal Touch: Referring to Raj Chetty as “the Beyoncé of economics.” – Greg Rosalski [07:06]

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Key Timestamps

• [00:43–03:24]: Ysena’s early experience and the origins of Hope VI.
• [04:15–05:23]: Introduction to Raj Chetty’s research and dataset.
• [12:27–14:08]: Major findings on income and life outcomes for children.
• [16:18–17:09]: Dosage effect and sibling comparisons.
• [19:17–20:24]: Not all Hope VI neighborhoods produced the same results; proximity to affluent neighborhoods was required.
• [21:06–22:35]: Three theories for why social integration matters.
• [25:13–26:27]: Criticisms, limitations, and policy implications.
• [28:03–29:59]: Ysena’s endorsement from lived experience.

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Conclusion

Planet Money’s episode provides compelling evidence that transforming poor neighborhoods into mixed-income communities can substantially improve life outcomes for children, but the benefits crucially depend on true economic integration and social connectivity. The findings suggest that policy makers should focus on reducing economic segregation and fostering meaningful, cross-class interactions—whether through housing, schools, or other avenues—while remaining mindful of the risks of displacement and exclusion in revitalization efforts.

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Transcript

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Greg Rosalski]

Planet Money is going on tour to promote our first ever book. It comes out in April and we'll.

[Keith Romer]

Be celebrating in about a dozen cities. There's a limited edition tote bag that is included with your ticket while supplies last.

[Greg Rosalski]

Details dates and how to get your [e-mail] the link is in the show notes.

[Ysena Williams]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[Keith Romer]

Ysena Williams still remembers the day she went to go watch a public housing tower near where she lived in North Philadelphia get knocked down.

[Ysena Williams]

I assume that it was going to fall over. So I don't know how it like you heard dynamites like six times go off. Then it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

[Greg Rosalski]

The tower was part of a development called Cambridge Plaza. We and some friends had walked over to see just what happened when you blew up a 14 story building.

[Ysena Williams]

Three, two, one. We was like, oh, it's going to come down on us and all this other stuff. No, actually it came down, but it came. That's probably so much. That's why they say so much smoke comes up because it just like smashed itself down.

[Keith Romer]

That demolition was part of this massive federal program started in the early 1990s called Hope 6. Congress wanted to do something to deal with all of these incredibly rundown public housing projects around the country. Hope6 provided money to demolish hundreds of those projects and in a lot of cases, to replace them with newer and better buildings.

[Greg Rosalski]

Wycina she herself lived in public housing. She grew up in a low rise development nearby called the Richard Allen Homes.

[Keith Romer]

What were the Richard Allen Homes like?

[Ysena Williams]

Depressing. Like we went to school and came.

[Keith Romer]

Home because it wasn't safe to be out on the street.

[Ysena Williams]

So let me use you. And you had to come to Richard Island. You would have rolled past like I'm not coming in there. Or you was greeted by a gun to your car. They probably would have thought you was coming to get drugs. So it was petrifying really.

[Keith Romer]

And how well maintained were the buildings?

[Ysena Williams]

So we had lead, the paint was chipping, the RV color was brown, the floor was brown, the wall was brown. You know, it wasn't, it just wasn't bright. It wasn't happy.

[Greg Rosalski]

So Weissena was thrilled when she and her mom and her son and her sister were allowed to move into a brand new home in R. Richard Allen funded by Hope6.

[Ysena Williams]

It was a relief. It was peace. Our windows open, we have fresh air. We control our heat. I had my own space. I loved it.

[Keith Romer]

From 1993 to 2010, 262 different public housing projects around the country were knocked down and replaced with Hope 6 money. So think like Cabrini Green in Chicago, the Desire housing projects in New Orleans, and yeah, the Richard Allen homes in Philadelphia. Beat up old projects were knocked down and in a lot of cases, replaced with public housing that was newer and safer and more connected to the neighborhoods that surrounded them.

[Greg Rosalski]

But there wasn't enough funding to redo all of public housing in the United States. Some folks got to live in newer, better buildings. Others, they were stuck with the older, worse buildings. And in that way, Hope6 created a kind of nationwide experiment.

[Keith Romer]

This experiment, it had the potential to change how we help people in public housing, but also how we help people in all these other kinds of low income neighborhoods. Our country is really segregated economically. Hope six tried to reverse that. It tried to transform neighborhoods with really concentrated poverty into neighborhoods with mixed incomes.

[Greg Rosalski]

And if that approach worked to lift people out of poverty, maybe it could become a model for poor neighborhoods all over the country. But no one really knew whether that Hope 6 experiment actually worked until now.

[Keith Romer]

Can you just read the name of your study? The title?

[Raj Chetty]

Creating High Opportunity Neighborhoods. Evidence from the Hope 6 program.

[Keith Romer]

Did you get a lot of evidence?

[Raj Chetty]

We did.

[Greg Rosalski]

The evidence gatherer here, Harvard economist Raj Chetty.

[Keith Romer]

Should people keep listening to this podcast to hear all the evidence?

[Raj Chetty]

Absolutely they should. I think the evidence is very compelling.

[Keith Romer]

Thank you.

[Greg Rosalski]

Wow, you really sold it. That's like the worst trailer ever. You should do, like, with, like, a deeper voice. Remember this, like, 90s movies. Where is that one guy who did all of them? The evidence is compelling.

[Keith Romer]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Keith Romer.

[Greg Rosalski]

And I'm Greg Rosalski. And all jokes and bad impressions aside, that evidence is. It is actually really compelling. Raj and his team got access to all this data for more than a million families in public housing across three decades. And they are releasing their analysis of that data in a working paper today. This podcast, it's hot off the presses. This is big for us today on.

[Keith Romer]

The show what they found. One of the clearest answers ever to this absolutely crucial question. Can we help people rise out of poverty by improving the neighborhood where they live?

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Keith Romer]

Regular listeners of Planet Money may recognize the name of our economist, Raj Chetty. He's been on the show before. Greg, you are something of a Raj Chetty super fan.

[Greg Rosalski]

Yeah, I guess. Keith. Some people have Tom Brady. I have Raj Chetty.

[Keith Romer]

Greg, I'm just going to play the tape of you greeting Raj when he came into the Zoom with us.

[Greg Rosalski]

Well, if it is not the Beyonce of economics.

[Raj Chetty]

Hey there Greg. How are you?

[Greg Rosalski]

Good, how are you? So Raj is kind of an icon. He leads this research group at Harvard called Opportunity Insights. They do world class research on really important problems. You know, they try to figure out what actually works to fight poverty, reduce inequality and make the American dream like a reality for low income people.

[Keith Romer]

And there is one big factor that shows up again and again and again in their work.

[Raj Chetty]

We found through a series of prior papers that the neighborhood in which you grow up, the block in which you live, the school you attend, really matters for your life outcomes.

[Keith Romer]

Probably their most famous research looked at what happens when low income kids move to more affluent neighborhoods.

[Raj Chetty]

And we found that if you move at a younger age, especially to an opportunity rich area, you end up doing dramatically better later in life. If you have more high income connections as you're growing up, people who are in more successful careers, who have better jobs, et cetera, you yourself are more likely to rise out of poverty.

[Greg Rosalski]

Those younger kids who moved to better off neighborhoods ended up being more likely to go to college and to earn.

[Keith Romer]

More as adults, which obviously was a very promising result. But Raj says it was a little hard to use what they learned as a model for generating upward mobility everywhere.

[Raj Chetty]

I think that, you know, approach of desegregation and moving to opportunity has a lot of value, but it's not scalable. You can't move everyone to A different neighborhood.

[Greg Rosalski]

All right, moving kids works, but it isn't scalable. So what if you flip that idea on its head? What if instead of moving low income kids to better off neighborhoods, you can move better off neighborhoods to those kids? You know, maybe there's a way to transform poor neighborhoods themselves into places that help kids escape poverty.

[Raj Chetty]

And that's a question that led to this study where we essentially analyzed the largest effort ever in the US to revitalize high poverty neighborhoods, which is the Hope 6 neighborhood revitalization program.

[Keith Romer]

Hope 6, that program we were talking about with Weissena before. The idea behind the policy was not to just replace run down old housing projects with newer housing projects. It was to change the way public housing interacted with the cities that surrounded them. Specifically to desegregate neighborhoods economically.

[Greg Rosalski]

Yeah, the old housing projects had really separated low income people from the rest of their community.

[Raj Chetty]

Those places were essentially islands that were cut off from the surrounding neighborhoods. There's very little interaction between people living in those housing projects and the people nearby.

[Greg Rosalski]

In the New Hope 6 projects, there was by design a mix of different kinds of housing. Some public housing, some housing for people who made too much to qualify for public housing, and some full on market rate housing.

[Keith Romer]

And you could see the change in the neighborhoods in this really physical way. Why? Sina, the woman from the Richard Allen Homes in Philadelphia, she still lives there today. She's actually the tenant council president. And when I was down in Philly, she offered to take me on a tour.

[Ysena Williams]

We're gonna get that out the way, cause it's cold.

[Keith Romer]

Okay.

[Ysena Williams]

So I'm grab my coat, let them know what I'm about to do, and then we out.

[Keith Romer]

Love it.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Okay.

[Keith Romer]

Some of the buildings in the Richard Allen Homes were built during Hope 6. Some of them were old ones that never got knocked down.

[Ysena Williams]

This part what we call the new. And then when we get on Tiffin Brown, that's where the old is still.

[Keith Romer]

At first she took me to see one of the old buildings. On both sides of the street were these three story tall brick apartment buildings. Weycina told me that back in the day none of those buildings had doors onto the street. Like it was just one long brick wall with a few windows for the length of the whole block.

[Ysena Williams]

You didn't have a door. Your door was in the inside.

[Keith Romer]

So it was kind of, it was like closed off to the street.

[Ysena Williams]

Yes.

[Keith Romer]

The old buildings, they were really isolated from the outside world. To get inside, you had to enter in through this courtyard that basically only someone from Richard Allen Would even go.

[Ysena Williams]

Into, like, I call it the pit. Like, you were just in the middle of the pit.

[Keith Romer]

It was almost like the old version of the Richard Allen homes was designed to keep people from the projects from interacting with anyone who wasn't also from the projects. From there. Weissena walked me over a couple blocks to the new buildings that came in with hope 6. Two story brick houses, three facing onto the street, each with their own front yard. I mean, these houses have, like, a lot of space between them.

[Ysena Williams]

Right?

[Keith Romer]

Like, it's almost like we're in the suburbs a little bit.

[Ysena Williams]

Right. I think they wanted to make it more like a family so the kids can come outside and play and do stuff that they wanted to do. They made it like homes, like, you know, a neighborhood again.

[Keith Romer]

Instead of being disconnected on its own island. The public housing in the new Richard Allen homes is open to the surrounding neighborhood. It's connected to it. And on blocks where there used to be just public housing for low income people, now there's housing for people with different incomes. It literally transformed the neighborhood economically.

[Greg Rosalski]

So the question for Raj and his team was, did Hope 6 actually help to reduce poverty and improve upward mobility? And to answer those questions, they got their hands on these massive data sets.

[Raj Chetty]

We studied more than a million families, followed them over decades and looked at how their own outcomes, their kids outcomes, changed over time. Adults did not benefit that much from living in an area that was revitalized. However, very importantly, kids benefited substantially.

[Keith Romer]

Raj and his colleagues looked at the kids who grew up in the revitalized Hope six developments and saw what they were earning as adults at age 30.

[Raj Chetty]

So if you grew up in the exact same place after it was revitalized through this program, in a mixed income neighborhood with additional services, basically a better environment in many different ways, you ended up earning about 50% more if you grew up from birth in one of these places, 50% more than if you had grown up in the exact same place pre revitalization. So that's an enormous change in kids outcomes.

[Keith Romer]

To be clear, that number is kind of an extrapolation.

[Greg Rosalski]

So different kids lived in Hope six developments for different amounts of time. Some were there for only like a year, some for their entire childhoods. And according to the team's calculations, the average kid who spent their whole childhood in Hope 6 development, they would see a roughly 50% boost to their income.

[Keith Romer]

Hope 6 kids also went to college more often. Incarceration rates for the boys who grew up there went down. And those are pretty jaw dropping findings, but it was possible that they didn't have anything to do with making neighborhoods more mixed income or connecting public housing with the rest of their communities. In other words, hope 6 might not have been what caused these good results at all.

[Greg Rosalski]

I saw some evidence suggesting, I think, including in your paper, that the Hope 6 projects were much more selective in who was allowed into them. What would you say to that concern? That these kids are just systematically different?

[Matt Stager]

There's really kind of two main explanations for why we're seeing kind of gains for the children who grow up in the revitalized sites.

[Keith Romer]

This is Matt Stager, one of the economists on Raj's team. He says the first explanation was that, yes, Hope 6 was causing the good results.

[Matt Stager]

A second explanation, which is the one you're hinting at here, is one of selection, in which the types of families that move into these revitalized public housing units may be different in ways that their kids would have done better in the long run, regardless of where they lived.

[Greg Rosalski]

And to a lot of housing advocates we talked to for this story, this second explanation seemed really plausible. In a lot of places, there was this whole screening process to get into the New Hope 6 developments. Some people who had lived in the old housing projects simply weren't allowed to move into the new buildings.

[Keith Romer]

And for Raj and Matt and the other researchers, this presented a real problem because it wasn't random who moved into the New Hope 6. Housing economists call this selection bias. It was possible that the reason kids in Hope six were doing better as adults was, like Matt said, just that they were always going to do better no matter where they lived.

[Greg Rosalski]

To get around this problem, the team went back to an idea from earlier studies, an idea about how neighborhoods shaped the way kids lives turn out.

[Matt Stager]

The way that neighborhoods influence people operates through kind of an exposure or dosage mod. So in other words, what the literature on neighborhoods has shown us is that the influence that a neighborhood has on you is proportional to the amount of time that you spend growing up in that neighborhood.

[Keith Romer]

The team had data on how long people lived in Hope 6 developments as kids, and it turned out you saw a way bigger impact on the kids who were there for a long time versus just a year or two. You could see that dosage idea in the data.

[Matt Stager]

Each additional year that a child spends in One of these Hope 6 revitalized projects increases their earning by almost 3%.

[Greg Rosalski]

So, yeah, it looked like Hope 6 caused better outcomes, but it could still be the case that families who stayed a long time in Hope six were just different from the families who stayed.

[Keith Romer]

A short while, yeah, maybe those families who left super quickly were somehow less stable, and that was why their kids saw less benefit than the kids in families who stayed poor. And this is where they made this move in the research. That is honestly just so clever. I'm going to give it like, official Planet Money tip of the hat.

[Greg Rosalski]

Planet Money tip of the hat. That's a huge award, Keith.

[Keith Romer]

So what they did is they went ahead and compared the dosage effect within families by looking at siblings who Both lived in Hope 6 housing, but for different amounts of time.

[Matt Stager]

Consider a family that has an 8 year old and an 18 year old, and they move into one of these revitalized public housing projects. The younger sibling should earn more later in life compared to their older sibling who only spends a year in the public housing project. That's exactly what we find in the data.

[Greg Rosalski]

Okay, so, yes, they were now pretty confident that what they were seeing in the data was real, that there was something about growing up in the New Hope 6 public housing that made a big difference. But to be able to use their findings to shape policy going forward, they really needed to sort of hone in on what was actually causing this improvement in outcomes.

[Keith Romer]

Because if it was about just improving the physical housing itself, you'd want to put all your money into that. Or if it was about the whole mixing incomes idea, you know, just do that. Or maybe it was about some third thing that they weren't even thinking of.

[Greg Rosalski]

Basically, it wasn't clear what part of Hope 6 exactly was causing the big difference in outcomes. At some point, Matt started explaining this puzzle to Carol Naughton, a woman he knew who ran a big housing nonprofit.

[Matt Stager]

I remember talking to her and saying, look, we find these big gains, but we want to go beyond just understanding that the program work and say something about why it works so that we could potentially kind of scale up this type of intervention.

[Greg Rosalski]

Carol's from Atlanta, and she told Matt that she had noticed that not all Hopesick sites in Atlanta were the same, that some of them did much better than others.

[Matt Stager]

And in her experience, it was the sites that were located near more economic opportunity, near more affluent areas where there were some economic resources to tap into. That's where she thought that the program was most successful.

[Keith Romer]

And Matt was like, huh, what if we went back over our Data and grouped Hope6 developments according to how well off the neighborhoods around them were?

[Matt Stager]

And so, out of that discussion, we took that back to the data and looked in the data, and that's exactly what we found and turned out to Be kind of a key turning point in our ability to figure out, like, what was actually going on in terms of driving the mechanisms.

[Greg Rosalski]

So just to underline a little bit what Matt is saying here, not all Hope six developments were created equal. As far as this whole income mixing idea went. If a Hope 6 development was near richer neighborhoods, the kids in public housing there tended to do really well. If surrounding neighborhoods were poor, though, The Kids in Hope 6 development saw no gains.

[Matt Stager]

It's only in cases where the kids who live nearby had better outcomes, were from more affluent families do we really see meaningful gains of the program.

[Greg Rosalski]

This strongly suggests that Hope6 caused better outcomes, not because it improved the housing or got rid of lead paint or whatever. It suggested that these new neighborhoods fostered more social integration between kids from different backgrounds. When that crucial ingredient was missing, the Hope six kids did not see better outcomes.

[Keith Romer]

And they were even able to show that the Hope 6 kids really were interacting more with the more well off kids. They were more connected to each other on Facebook and more likely to live together as adults.

[Matt Stager]

And that is what appeared to be central in driving the long run gains in their outcomes.

[Keith Romer]

So it's not the architecture, it's like who you're interacting with.

[Matt Stager]

Yeah, not the architecture per se that generated these gains.

[Greg Rosalski]

Now this is all pretty astounding. Low income kids do way better when they interact with or are friends with higher income kids. This is a crucial finding in their paper and it left us wondering why. So we asked Raj, why would these social interactions matter?

[Keith Romer]

So that's actually something I want to drill down on. And I realize this is in some ways beyond the scope of the paper, but it feels like a really present question, which is what are the possible stories for why that's occurring?

[Raj Chetty]

Yeah, so three different mechanisms through which we think connections matter for kids outcomes.

[Keith Romer]

They don't have clear data on this, but Raj has some theories. Theory number one is about how people get jobs.

[Raj Chetty]

If you're connected to somebody who's got a good job at a high paying firm, you're more likely to get that job. And so cross class interaction just directly affects the internships you get, the career you might end up pursuing.

[Greg Rosalski]

Theory number two is about information, information that you might get by like, you know, hanging out with your higher income friends or their families.

[Raj Chetty]

You get information from people who are exposed to different things. If you live near somebody whose parents went to a college, you might be more likely to think about applying to that college. You've at least heard of it.

[Keith Romer]

Raj's last theory is the one he personally finds the most compelling. And it's about what kids think is even possible for themselves.

[Raj Chetty]

I think people's aspirations and what they try to achieve themselves are greatly shaped by who they're around, especially as they grow up. I can say that from my own personal experience. You know, I grew up in a family of academics, certainly greatly influenced by that in my own career choices. And I think, you know, conversely, kids who have never had exposure to science, never had exposure to people pursuing higher education, pursuing business and so on, may just not see themselves. They may not even know where to start in terms of pursuing those opportunities. And so I think that's a really central reason that these kinds of interactions likely matter.

[Keith Romer]

Now, there's a part of me that reads a study like this and is like, this is great. We did it. We have an answer now for how to reduce poverty, how to cause upward mobility. We're done. But then it never seems to work out quite that cleanly in the real world. So next we're going to talk about how we're actually doing as a country at putting the ideas from this study into practice. And we're going to go back to Ysena, who raised her own son in a Hope 6 development to see what she thinks about the study. All of that after the break.

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[Keith Romer]

Podcast okay, so there are a few things you need to understand about Hope 6, this program that really changed outcomes for kids who grew up in public housing. The first is that it doesn't exist anymore. Funding for the Hope 6 program ended.

[Greg Rosalski]

14 years ago, in part because of some legitimate criticisms of how Hope 6 was implemented. The biggest criticism was that it knocked down a ton of public housing that it didn't replace. Almost 100,000 units were demolished, but only 55,000 public housing units were built back in their place. Tens of thousands of families were functionally kicked out of public housing by Hope 6.

[Keith Romer]

Raj and Matt made it very clear that it would actually be a mistake to read their research as a recommendation to just resurrect Hope 6.

[Matt Stager]

Our analysis definitely does not kind of endorse Hope 6 as a program. I think concerns around displacement should be taken very seriously. And so if one was trying to understand whether Hope 6 is a good or a bad policy, you'd really want to think seriously about how to weigh, you know, the benefits that we're estimating in our paper against the kind of displacement of costs which we have not tried to quantify in any real way.

[Greg Rosalski]

So yeah, Hope six had some big issues, but it also integrated low income kids with high income kids and that had a really positive impact on their future outcomes. Raj and Matt think that finding it matters for a lot more than just public housing. The country as a whole, it seems to be growing more and more economically segregated.

[Matt Stager]

About half of low income neighborhoods are just as socially isolated as Hope 6 projects were prior to revitalization.

[Keith Romer]

As part of their research, they built an interactive map that lets you Zoom in on 1500 different neighborhoods around the country that could benefit from something like Hope 6. These neighborhoods with concentrated poverty that could be better Connected to more affluent neighborhoods nearby.

[Greg Rosalski]

Ross says there are still federal programs that try to revitalize low income neighborhoods, but they're underfunded and not designed as well as they could be.

[Raj Chetty]

I think we could be doing more in terms of housing policy to create opportunities. I think we could be both spending money that we're already spending, which is $70 billion a year on various affordable housing programs more effectively. And we could potentially expand certain programs and design them better to improve outcomes.

[Greg Rosalski]

And he says we could help low income kids connect to higher income kids in all these other ways too, through schools and sports and even the way we design mass transit. The policy choices don't only have to.

[Raj Chetty]

Be about housing, but they have that same effect of creating that interaction that really seems to be the key mechanism through which Hope sex had an effect.

[Keith Romer]

So how does all this look to someone who actually lived through it? I asked Weissena, the woman who showed me around the Richard Allen homes, what she made of this study because she has this really interesting perspective on the changes that came with Hope Six. She moved into a new Hope Six building when she was 19. Her childhood happened in the old version of Richard Allen Holmes. She says almost all her friends growing up were from there. But her son, he grew up in the new version. Do you feel like your childhood was different from his childhood?

[Ysena Williams]

Yes. How educational wise, Living wise, just growing up.

[Keith Romer]

Weissena says her son always did what he was told. He was kind of a rule follower. He was really into Legos and electronics as a kid.

[Ysena Williams]

My son is a weirdo and I love it when I say not street smart at all, but he loves, like taking that leap.

[Greg Rosalski]

And she says he met kids from all over, including kids who lived outside of public housing. And yeah, some of them had parents who were better off financially.

[Keith Romer]

Do you think that that had any impact on his life?

[Ysena Williams]

Yes, I really do.

[Keith Romer]

Ysina's son graduated from high school about a decade ago.

[Ysena Williams]

My son is 29, 18. He went to Penn State.

[Keith Romer]

He was there for a year. Then he moved on to a trade.

[Ysena Williams]

School all on his own. I mean, not saying he, me and his dad didn't help out financially, but him doing it himself, knowing what he wanted.

[Greg Rosalski]

The idea that kids who grow up in better public housing in mixed income neighborhoods, that they would have a better chance of getting out of poverty. Ysena buys it.

[Ysena Williams]

Well, yes, they will because the atmosphere, the surroundings, because you're commemorating, you're coming from a mentality where you're caged in, where now you're not. So, yes, I do agree, yes, they will make more. They will succeed. Yes.

[Keith Romer]

Wycina's son turns 30 this year, the age Raj's team looked at to see how Hopesick's kids economic lives turned out. Her son, he's engaged, he's got a steady job driving a semi truck, and he's studying to get certified as an H vac technician. If you want to learn more about the study in this show, Greg also wrote an amazing Planet Money newsletter about it that does an incredible deep dive on the research. You can sign up for [e-mail] planetmoneynewsletter.

[Greg Rosalski]

Planet Money we're also putting out a book and we're going on a book tour. You can see us in person in April. We're going coast to coast. [e-mail] Today's episode was produced by Luis.

[Keith Romer]

Gaia with help from Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact checked by Ciara Juarez and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

[Greg Rosalski]

Special thanks to Larry Vail. I'm Greg Rosolski.

[Keith Romer]

And I'm Keith Romer. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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This message comes from NPR sponsor Capella University. With Capella's Flexpath learning format, you can set your own deadlines and learn on your schedule. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn [e-mail].

This message comes from EasyCater, the workplace food platform. Ezcator helps organizations order food from favorite restaurants, meet dietary needs and stay on budget with employee meal programs, flexible payment options and 247 customer support all on one platform. Learn [e-mail] this message comes from Greenlight. Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app that teaches kids and teens how to earn, save, spend wisely and invest. Start your risk free [e-mail] NPR.