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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Wysina Williams still remembers the day she went to go watch a public housing tower near where she lived in North Philadelphia get knocked down.
I assumed that it was going to fall over. So I don't know how, like you heard dynamites like six times go off.
Then it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. The tower was part of a development called Cambridge Plaza. Wysina and some friends had walked over to see just what happened when you blew up a 14-story building.
We was like, oh, it's going to come down on us and all this other stuff. No, actually, it came down, but it came. That's probably so much. That's why they say so much smoke comes up because it just like smashed itself down.
That demolition was part of this massive federal program started in the early 1990s called Hope Six. Congress wanted to do something to deal with all of these incredibly rundown public housing projects around the country. Hope Six provided money to demolish hundreds of those projects and, in a lot of cases, to replace them with newer and better buildings.
Wysina, she herself lived in public housing. She grew up in a low-rise development nearby called the Richard Allen Homes.
What were the Richard Allen Homes like?
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Chapter 2: What was the HOPE VI program and its purpose?
Our windows open. We have fresh air. We control our heat. I had my own space. I loved it.
From 1993 to 2010, 262 different public housing projects around the country were knocked down and replaced with Hope Six money. So think like Cabrini Green in Chicago, the Desire Housing Projects in New Orleans, and, yeah, the Richard Allen Homes in Philadelphia.
Beat-up old projects were knocked down and, in a lot of cases, replaced with public housing that was newer and safer and more connected to the neighborhoods that surrounded them.
But there wasn't enough funding to redo all of public housing in the United States. Some folks got to live in newer, better buildings. Others, they were stuck with the older, worse buildings. And in that way, Hope Six created a kind of nationwide experiment.
This experiment, it had the potential to change how we help people in public housing, but also how we help people in all these other kinds of low-income neighborhoods. Our country is really segregated economically. Hope Six tried to reverse that. It tried to transform neighborhoods with really concentrated poverty into neighborhoods with mixed incomes.
And if that approach worked to lift people out of poverty, maybe it could become a model for poor neighborhoods all over the country. But no one really knew whether that HOPE VI experiment actually worked. Until now.
Can you just read the name of your study? The title?
creating high-opportunity neighborhoods, evidence from the HOPE VI program. Did you get a lot of evidence? We did.
The evidence gatherer here, Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Should people keep listening to this podcast to hear all the evidence?
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Chapter 3: How did HOPE VI impact the lives of residents?
He's been on the show before. Greg, you are something of a Raj Chetty superfan.
Yeah, I guess, Keith, some people have Tom Brady. I have Raj Chetty.
Greg, I'm just going to play the tape of you greeting Raj when he came into the Zoom with us.
Well, if it is not the Beyonce of economics.
Hey there, Greg. How are you?
So Raj is kind of an icon. He leads this research group at Harvard called Opportunity Insights. They do world-class research on really important problems. You know, they try to figure out what actually works to fight poverty, reduce inequality, and make the American dream like a reality for low-income people.
And there is one big factor that shows up again and again and again in their work.
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.
Probably their most famous research looked at what happens when low-income kids move to more affluent neighborhoods.
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Chapter 4: What were the outcomes of the HOPE VI experiment?
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 Matt was like, huh, what if we went back over our data and grouped Hope 6 developments according to how well off the neighborhoods around them were?
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.
So just to underline a little bit what Matt is saying here, not all hope six developments were created equal as far as this whole income mixing idea went. If a hope six development was near richer neighborhoods, the kids in public housing there tended to do really well. If surrounding neighborhoods were poor though, the kids in hope six development saw no gains.
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?
This strongly suggests that Hope 6 caused better outcomes, not because it improved the housing or got rid of lead paint or whatever. It suggests that these new neighborhoods fostered more social integration between kids from different backgrounds. When that crucial ingredient was missing, the Hope 6 kids did not see better outcomes.
And they were even able to show that the Hope Six kids really were interacting more with the more well-off kids. They were more connected to each other on Facebook and more likely to live together as adults.
And that is what appeared to be central in driving the long-run gains in their outcomes.
So it's not the architecture, it's like who you're interacting with.
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Chapter 5: How does neighborhood integration affect children's futures?
They will make more. They will succeed. Yes.
Wysina's son turns 30 this year, the age Raj's team looked at to see how Hope Six Kids' economic lives turned out. Her son, he's engaged, he's got a steady job driving a semi-truck, and he's studying to get certified as an HVAC technician.
If you want to learn more about the study in this show, Greg also wrote an amazing Planet Money newsletter about it that does an incredible deep dive on the research. You can sign up for that at npr.org slash planetmoneynewsletter.
Planet Money, we're also putting out a book and we're going on a book tour. You can see us in person in April. We're going coast to coast. Details at planetmoneybook.com.
Today's episode was produced by Luis Gallo with help from Sam Yellow Horse Kessler. It was edited by Jess Jang, fact-checked by Ciara Juarez, and engineered by Jimmy Keeley. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Special thanks to Larry Vail.
I'm Greg Rosalski. And I'm Keith Romer. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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