Karen Duffin
speaker
53 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Karen Duffin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is Planet Money from NPR.
Once upon a time, in a cubicle not so far away, sat a government bureaucrat in his government-issued chair preparing for a very big meeting. It was 1994, and Mark Schroeder was an economist at HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and his team in D.C. had just flown in local public housing authorities from five major cities.
The staff gathers in a basement conference room. It's about 30 people. These are people who run what's now known as the Section 8 Voucher Program, which is a voucher that subsidizes rent for low-income families. It's like a monthly payment to a landlord. Families can wait years on waiting lists just to get one.
Everyone settles into their chairs, you know, sipping their government-brewed coffee, and the meeting starts. They learn that they are about to join a test program. Small in the scheme of HUD overall, but a huge change. They're going to start handing out a new kind of voucher to a small group of their tenants. And then HUD is going to run an experiment on them.
With the old vouchers, people could, at least in theory, move anywhere they wanted. But people who get this new voucher, they are required to use it to move to what HUD calls low-poverty neighborhoods. So just a nicer neighborhood. This is sort of a radical change for HUD.
Unlimited in theory, at least. But what the majority of tenants have chosen was to use the vouchers to stay in high-poverty neighborhoods for a lot of complicated reasons, including discrimination. Landlords often refuse to take Section 8 tenants. So back in the basement at HUD, as this big new idea gets introduced—
I imagine people, you know, put down their government brewed coffee and start raising their hands. Like, why are we doing this? Our job is to move people into housing, period. Now HUD is basically asking them to reverse that, to move people out.
Mark and the people running this meeting, they're like, yeah, I know. But now our job is to move people to opportunity. You know, the government spends money across all kinds of programs just trying to improve people's lives like give them better education or health or increase their income.
And the big idea that they want to test is can we improve all of those things and more all at once just by moving a family somewhere new? But, of course, to get the government to give money, you have to prove that it works.
You know, control group, independent variable. We will run an actual scientific experiment and we'll track the data for decades.
Can changing someone's address change their life? The answer to that seems very obvious. But this experiment did not at all go as planned.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Karen Duffin. Today on the show, we are riding a social policy roller coaster. Alongside the researchers who ran this experiment and the people they tested it on, people who were not always excited to be experimented on, it is a quest to make the American dream a reality. A quest that economists thought failed, but is in the midst of an unexpected revival.
Mark and this tiny band of public housing staff leave that conference room, go forth from D.C., and start signing up tenants. The way it worked was this. Tenants from the five chosen cities would be assigned by lottery to one of three groups. Like any good experiment, there would be a control group. This group already lives in public housing and they would stay in public housing.
So no change to group one. Group two would get a regular Section 8 voucher. This is the rent subsidy that they can theoretically use with any landlord who will take it. And group three, this group is the experimental group.
They would also get the Section 8 voucher, but they had to use it to move out to a completely different neighborhood, one where just 10% or less of their neighbors were what the government has classified as poor. For context, most of them had been living in neighborhoods with about 50% poverty. So HUD was asking them to move to what should hopefully be a better neighborhood.
But not everyone was excited about that.
When HUD surveyed families about this, the families said, yes, we do want a voucher, but we want it just because we want to make sure our house is decent and we want to get into a safer neighborhood.
For them, housing was just housing, not opportunity.
The vast majority of people who get vouchers do not use them to move to areas with lower poverty.
Also, Mark and his HUD crew were asking people to participate in a science experiment on themselves, asking them to be living test subjects for a theory they have not proven yet, which is an especially hard thing to take from the federal government, a government that has a history of intentionally segregating people of color into high-poverty neighborhoods. The experiment took years to set up.
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