Creating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI Program
Matthew Staiger, a Research Scientist at Opportunity Insights at Harvard University, will present a co-authored paper, “Creating High-Opportunity Neighborhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI Program.” He and fellow researchers studied whether low-economic-mobility neighborhoods can be transformed into high-mobility areas by analyzing the HOPE VI program, which invested $17 billion to revitalize 262 distressed public housing developments. They estimated the program’s impacts using a matched difference-in-differences design, comparing residents living in developments before versus after revitalization with residents of observably similar control developments, using anonymized tax records.
HOPE VI reduced neighborhood poverty rates by attracting higher-income families to revitalized neighborhoods, but had no causal impact on the earnings of adults living in public housing units. Children raised in revitalized public housing units earned more, were more likely to attend college, and were less likely to be incarcerated. Using a movers exposure design and sibling comparisons, they showed that these improvements were driven by changes in neighborhoods’ causal effects on children’s outcomes.
The improvements in neighborhood causal effects were driven in part by changes in social interaction: HOPE VI increased interaction between public housing residents and peers in surrounding neighborhoods and increased earnings more for subgroups with higher-income peers. Many low-income families in the U.S. currently live in neighborhoods that are as socially isolated as the HOPE VI developments were prior to revitalization. The researchers concluded that it is feasible to create high-opportunity neighborhoods and that connecting socially isolated areas to surrounding communities is a cost-effective approach to doing so.
Speaker Bio
Matthew Staiger is a Research Scientist at Opportunity Insights at Harvard University. His research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity, particularly how neighborhoods, family connections, and labor market institutions shape earnings inequality and intergenerational economic mobility. His recent work examines how housing and neighborhood policies can improve economic outcomes for children growing up in disadvantaged communities. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Maryland.