Matt Steger

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.

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.

the way that neighborhoods influence people operates through kind of an exposure or dosage model.

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.

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

Consider a family that has an eight-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.

I remember talking to her and saying, you know, look, we find these big gains, but what

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.

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

that's where she thought that the program was most successful.

And so, you know, out of that discussion, we took that, you know, 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.

It's only in cases where the kids who live nearby had, uh, had better outcomes were from more affluent families.

do we really see meaningful gains of the program?

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

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

Our analysis definitely does not kind of endorse Hope Six as a program.

I think