Greg Rosalski

Can we help people rise out of poverty by improving the neighborhood where they live?

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 superfan.

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

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

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

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.

HOPE VI, that program we were talking about with Wysina before.

The idea behind the policy was not to just replace rundown 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.

And you could see the change in the neighborhoods in this really physical way.

Wysina, 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.

Love it.

Some of the buildings in the Richard Allen homes were built during Hope Six.

Some of them were old ones that never got knocked down.

First, she took me to see one of the old buildings.