The Harvard economist Raj Chetty, justly famous for his studies of the factors that enable upward mobility in America, is back with a new analysis that has attracted wide attention. Thanks to access to the individual tax records of a million former public housing residents whom his Opportunity Insights team tracked, he determined that a move from “the projects” to a new, mixed-income community led to long-term economic gains for children.
Any federal policy — in this case, the Clinton-era HOPE VI program to demolish crime-ridden public housing such as Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, the nation’s largest — that leads to a better life for poor people deserves to be celebrated. Chetty’s findings are being lauded as a demonstration that government housing programs can work, as per the New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof gushing that the study highlights the means for “how to keep the American Dream Alive.”
At the same time, however, Chetty, by focusing on select data, as revealing as it is, overlooks another underlying story. After all, it was the federal government, working through local public housing authorities, which had created deeply dysfunctional apartment complexes such as Robert Taylor in the first place. It’s an understatement to observe that moving up from Robert Taylor — a complex of 28 isolated high-rises on the Chicago lakefront famously featured in the Alex Kotlowitz book There Are No Children Here — was comparatively easy. What could be worse?
Indeed, it’s the comparison to public housing that is central to Chetty’s findings. As the study puts it: “Children who moved into the HOPE VI public housing units post-revitalization earned 16% more, were 17% more likely to attend college, and, among boys, were 20% less likely to be incarcerated than their counterparts in non-revitalized matched control projects.” (Some 27% of former project residents were guaranteed a “right to return” to housing, through HOPE VI.)
What’s more, the key assumption of Chetty’s study, that exposure to higher-income households was a positive influence on children from poor households, is not guaranteed to persist. Keep in mind that, when public housing was new, it, too, was a desirable residence and launched successful children. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, as did the great baseball player Kirby Puckett. There was a time when New York public housing authorities insisted that, for admittance, families comprise two parents and an employed breadwinner.
What’s more, middle-class households have choices as to where to live and, over time, they may decide not to live with poorer neighbors — even if those neighbor’s children experienced a 20% decline in incarceration rates. (Not entirely reassuring.) That’s exactly what happened with first-generation public housing.
There are two additional complications with Chetty’s latest study. Even if one accepts his thesis that moves to “higher opportunity neighborhoods” boost the life chances of the poor, that does not mean such an approach can “scale,” as policy wonks say. Most poor households will continue to live in poor neighborhoods; HUD’s original mission was to improve life there and it’s a goal worth recalling, including on the part of local governments.
Then there’s a group of Chetty’s data about former public housing residents who move to HOPE VI projects overlooks: poor families who move to higher-income neighborhoods without government help through their own efforts. Do their children fare even better than HOPE VI children? What about the adults — who, per Chetty, stagnate economically in the mixed-income communities?Â
Moving to a “better” neighborhood, notably, likely requires an important series of life choices, including steady employment and perhaps even becoming or remaining a two-income household through marriage. This form of upward mobility is based on individual agency — rather than creating a new housing complex.
GOVERNMENT PROVISION OF SYNAGOGUE SECURITY PROVES COMPLEX
Chetty’s core idea, to connect isolated poor communities with better-off surrounding areas, is a good one. But subsidized housing is not the only way to do so. Small, owner-occupied two or three-family homes could provide a way for better-off public housing residents to become small property owners — or tenants of higher-income landlords. Moreover, healthy neighborhoods include stores, churches, and good schools — not just apartments. HOPE VI, like public housing, does not include these.
As always, Raj Chetty finds revealing outcomes from heretofore unmined subsidized housing data, his specialty. But cities and the economic life of their residents offer more opportunities for other types of research not based on analysis of government programs.
Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing” (NYU Press, 2025).