Raj Chetty

Thank you, Lynn.

My pleasure.

creating high-opportunity neighborhoods, evidence from the HOPE VI program.

Did you get a lot of evidence?

We did.

Absolutely, they should.

I think the evidence is very compelling.

Hey there, Greg.

How are you?

We found through a series of prior papers that...

The neighborhood in which you grow up, the block in which you live, the school you attend, really matters for your life outcomes.

And we found that if you move at a younger age, especially to an opportunity-rich area, you end up doing dramatically better later in life.

If you have more high-income connections as you're growing up,

people who are in more successful careers, who have better jobs, etc., you yourself are more likely to rise out of poverty.

I think that, you know, approach of desegregation and moving to opportunity has a lot of value, but it's not scalable.

You can't move everyone to a different neighborhood.

And that's a question that led to this study where we essentially analyzed the largest effort ever in the U.S.,

to revitalize high-poverty neighborhoods, which is the HOPE VI Neighborhood Revitalization Program.

Those places were essentially islands that were cut off from the surrounding neighborhoods.

There was very little interaction between people living in those housing projects and the people nearby.