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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What they found specifically is that kids who move under the age of 13, over time, they earn about 30 percent more.
Teen pregnancies, less likely. The data also seems to indicate that these benefits will probably be passed on to their children. This all did come with a caveat. For kids who are moved when they're older than 13, they earn less over time. The move is actually slightly harmful for that group.
But when you look at the younger kids, and over time as they earn more money, they pay more income taxes, and with that, the program actually looks like it pays for itself. So Nathan and his research pals are looking at all of this really exciting data.
They write all this up in a paper, they release it, and then... Overnight, we were inundated.
Did you get a lot of those emails before this? No.
Many of these emails are coming from people who work in public housing who are saying, look, now that we know that this thing works, we should reboot the original HUD program. And Nathan is excited about that prospect, but he does know that if they reboot this, there needs to be an important addition.
Because in the original program, you know, way back in the 90s, people who were given vouchers on the condition that they had to move to a better neighborhood, more than half of those people just gave the voucher back, basically said, I would rather forfeit this than be told where I have to move.
So if Nathan wants this to be more than just a nice research paper with nice data about opportunity, someone will need to figure out how to get people to actually move to that opportunity. So Nathan and his team, they start working with cities to basically reboot moving to opportunity. The original MTO program, it required people who got the special vouchers to move to low-poverty areas.
But in this reboot, families can choose to move wherever they want. What Nathan and his team are trying to test is whether people have not been moving to Opportunity because they don't want to, or is it just because they need a little support? So in their first test city in Seattle, one group gets a voucher and the other group gets a voucher, but also support.
A sort of housing counselor to help navigate things like transportation in the new neighborhood. even helps cover security deposits. These counselors also work with landlords. Could this simple intervention get people to move voluntarily?
But they tried it out in Seattle. And after a year?
More than three times the number of people chose to move to an area with higher opportunity when they were given support from a counselor. And all of this data from the original MTO study, this new one, was so compelling that the unthinkable happened. Congress recently passed a bipartisan bill giving federal funds to replicate programs like this across the country.
Nathan and that team will also be expanding to new cities. And yes, we do now know that housing policy can be hope. Housing policy, we are sorry we underestimated you. Thank you for your service. But for now, we can probably only call it a sliver of hope because the number of families whose lives are improving through this program is really just a tiny drop in a much bigger pool.
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