Greg Rosalski

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

That demolition was part of this massive federal program started in the early 1990s called Hope Six.

Congress wanted to do something to deal with all of these incredibly rundown public housing projects around the country.

Hope Six provided money to demolish hundreds of those projects and, in a lot of cases, to replace them with newer and better buildings.

What were the Richard Allen Homes like?

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

And how well maintained were the buildings?

From 1993 to 2010, 262 different public housing projects around the country were knocked down and replaced with Hope Six 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.

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.

Can you just read the name of your study?

The title?

The evidence gatherer here, Harvard economist Raj Chetty.

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

Today on the show...

what they found, one of the clearest answers ever to this absolutely crucial question.