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Tearing Down Housing Projects But Building Up Kids

Spotlight Staff

Spotlight Staff, posted on February 4, 2026

Enhanced social connections—the simple act of meeting other kids from other, more prosperous neighborhoods—may be central to providing the hope of upward mobility for children living in low-income areas, a new study finds.

The latest work from Harvard University economist Raj Chetty and his Opportunity Insights team—featured in a Brookings Institution webinar on Monday—analyzes the impact of the Hope VI urban revitalization project.

Beginning in 1993, Hope VI invested $17 billion to replace 262 high-poverty public housing projects across the nation—a project that was deemed controversial in some quarters, as critics complained that it created gentrification by allowing more affluent people to move into previously vulnerable neighborhoods.

The Opportunity Insights research “offers the first comprehensive look at how Hope VI reshaped economic mobility for public housing residents and the findings shed new light on neighborhood disadvantage and mechanisms behind it, and where revitalization efforts could make the greatest impact going forward,” said Robert Puentes, Vice President and Director of Brookings Metro.

Matthew Staiger, a research scientist at Opportunity Insights, said the study attempted to compare the economic fortunes of residents in the Hope VI neighborhoods with residents of similarly distressed housing areas that were not chosen for the federal program.

The research found that positive economic results from the housing overhaul were negligible for adults, but dramatically positive for children. Children moving into public housing in the redeveloped neighborhoods—which now included a mix of incomes—saw a 17 percent increase in the likelihood that they would attend college and, among boys, a 20 percent decrease in the prospect that they would end up incarcerated.

Staiger said the Opportunity Insights study projects that each year that a family spends in a revitalized public housing unit increases the lifetime earnings of their children by $25,000.

And the study also indicates that it is not just simply living in a safer, cleaner home that made the difference—it was also the exposure to kids from other socio-economic groups, as Hope VI brought in non-subsidized renters into housing projects as well. This was particularly true, Staiger said, for communities that were located near other neighborhoods that had better chances for economic advancement.

“The benefits of Hope VI are driven not just by improvements in housing quality per se, but it has something fundamentally to do with a change in the nature of social interactions,” Staiger said.

“The evidence points to a story in which, before Hope VI, these projects were islands of disadvantage that were socially disconnected from the surrounding communities. And what Hope VI did was, it has integrated public housing residents into the broader areas. And these connections ended up dramatically increasing the long run outcomes of the kids in public housing.”

Staiger, Chetty and other panelists on the Brookings webinar said housing redevelopment is not the only way to promote more varied social connections for low-income children. Changes in zoning laws, transportation investments, crime reduction, educational innovation and building more public spaces are other potential strategies.

“We should be really clear that there’s never going to be just one solution for everything,” said Carol Naughton, CEO of Purpose Built Communities. “Getting more people on a pathway to economic mobility in this country is going to take lots of good ideas and lots of good strategies. I think this is one of them.”

Henry Cisneros, who was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development when Hope VI was launched, said that while he was “very, very happy to see these results,” he believes a mixture of dynamics account for the gains. “One of them was the physical setting did make a difference. We ended up with rental apartments for sale, town homes, senior citizen sites, youth recreation centers, police patrol units within the structures. And it was just a much better place to live, which I think had substantial impacts in changing people’s expectations and emotional motivation about where they lived.”

Opportunity Insights has highlighted about 1,300 neighborhoods across the nation that would be strong candidates for Hope VI-like program. Those prospective sites can be found on the Opportunity Insights web site.

Chetty said that no matter which policy option you choose to try to stimulate economic mobility, there is a common thread. “One common theme we’ve found, which relates to findings of the present study as well, is that in all of those domains, programs that are most effective combine resources with a social capital or connection element.”