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Economist Raj Chetty has found a surprising tool to fight housing segregation
- tomasien 7y agoThere are many hyper-local issues like this where the real solution involves: - actually wanting the problem to get solved - finding out, at a very micro-level, how to solve it - deploying those seemingly unscalable resources towards solving the problem I suspect it will be more challenging to roll this out in a wider pilot and then city/state/nationwide because of bullet point #1.
- Zanni 7y agoIndeed. My understanding is that most socio-economic housing segregation is deliberate (on the part of those that can afford it). The ethno-racial segregation is a byproduct. Potential allies of reforming the latter are de facto opposition due to the former.
- roywiggins 7y agoRacial segregation in the US is at least partly a direct descendant of New Deal and postwar housing policy that mandated segregated housing projects. Segregation was a deliberate policy and a massive social engineering effort. There is nothing natural about the current amount of segregation in the US.
- xbmcuser 7y agoSegregation happens naturally as well. In Singapore after few race violence instances government made it mandarory for all government provided housing have a similar make up as the population in general.
- aaronbrethorst 7y agoNot a descendant. Redlining was explicitly part of the New Deal era’s HOLC’s mission. There’s a great podcast on the topic from a couple years ago here: https://castro.fm/episode/UxCiQp https://castro.fm/episode/UxCiQp Segregation was a deliberate policy and a massive social engineering effort Yep you got that right for sure.
- em-bee 7y agoit shouldn't be more challenging if each locality addresses this problem on their own on the local level. the problem with doing a nationwide campain is that they tend to be pushed from above with a one size fits all approach: if it worked in seattle, then it must work in miami. but really, each locality needs to approach this on their own and find a locally appropriate way to solve it. as you say finding out, at a very micro-level, how to solve it
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> Most American cities have a stark racial divide. In Seattle, the divide runs north to south: North Seattle is largely white; South Seattle is largely not. Wouldn't this mean the divide runs east to west?
- aaronharnly 7y agoI know what you mean, but it’s more of a gradient than a divide. Here’s a regional ethnicity map: https://www.psrc.org/sites/default/files/race16.jpg https://www.psrc.org/sites/default/files/race16.jpg
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWow. I have trouble seeing how that could possibly be called a "stark racial divide".
- icsllaf 7y agoThe entire map is the metro Seattle area. Zoom into Seattle where the northmost dotted line is and the divide is pretty evident.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoSo, if you restrict yourself to downtown Seattle, it looks like a clear divide, but if you go to the Seattle city limits, it doesn't, and if you go to the Seattle metro area, it looks even less like that? What's the problem supposed to be? And why is "North Seattle" being used to refer to the northern half of downtown, rather than the northern part of Seattle?
- kaitai 7y agoThis is exactly why local/micro-level expertise is so important. It's common in the US now for areas just on the city limits of bigger cities to be more mixed racially and socioeconomically than ever before; this is a temporal as well as spatial phenomenon driven by the change from "white flight" to the suburbs to instead lots of folks moving to the suburbs because they're cheaper than the downtowns, and the suburbs mixing racially because they've removed their sundown laws and racial covenants. Now many downtown areas are coveted instead of abandoned, with luxury condos instead of skid row. I don't know anything about Seattle. If you look at the area of the clear divide, what differentiates the houses on one side from the houses on the other side? In Minneapolis-St Paul, there are pretty clear differences in amenities between many racially separated areas: more trees and walking paths in some areas; fewer trees, worse streets, and highway noise in others. What are you asking when you ask, "What's the problem supposed to be?" I don't quite get it.
- paraxion 7y agoI'm absolutely in no way qualified to interpret results, but it seems like in Western Australia we've had a similar policy since the 1990s, where the WA Housing Authority put policy in place to ensure that no suburb had more than 1 in 9 houses dedicated to public/government housing. https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/the-suburbs-bearing-the-brunt-of-perth-s-public-housing-20190306-p5124q.html https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/the-su... That said, there's been some notable kerfuffles when "rich" suburbs didn't want their allocation.
- indemnity 7y agoOver in NZ, there isn’t an official rule, but as if by magic, new subdivisions in wealthier areas don’t have social housing, but new subdivisions in more working class areas have plenty.
- linkregister 7y agoI wonder if the shire wants to save money by purchasing properties in lower-cost areas.
- mschuster91 7y agoIn Germany, property developers can be forced to build X% of the project as "welfare housing" to avoid this scenario.
- ajdlinux 7y agoOver here in the ACT, we have an official policy of "salt and peppering", i.e. spreading public housing out evenly across the city including in wealthy areas. Of course, whether the policy matches the reality... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-15/canberra-public-housing-inner-city-reduction/11113346 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-15/canberra-public-housi...
- chii 7y agoalso, is it better to build public housing in expensive areas (which implies less housing for the same fixed budget), or build public housing at the lowest cost, maximal housing capacity (which implies going to lower cost areas).
- alexashka 7y ago> the housing navigators worked with landlords to expedite inspections and generally try to cut through red tape that might make landlords not want to deal with Section 8 So, the key to getting people to move, is to get the landlords to allow it. Surprising tool they call it?
- consultant-hole 7y agoI’m going to sound like an asshole, but part of the reason to pay 750k+ for a basic home is so that your family lives in a neighborhood with families of a similar socioeconomic background... what is the benefit of integrating housing to the people paying a premium for the privilege of living in an exclusive neighborhood?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- john_brown_body 7y agoWho knows or cares? Overcoming the opposition of wealthy, cloistered local elites is an important political problem, but the specific nature of their opposition isn't relevant to the policy issue or the public interest.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoYou don't often see the argument that understanding the nature of opposition to something isn't relevant to overcoming that opposition.
- john_brown_body 7y agoIt's relevant to the political problem of defeating their opposition, sure, but not relevant to the merits of the policy. It's also fairly obvious - rich people think they're better humans than poor people and don't want to live near them. Not worthy of much hand-wringing or fretting in my opinion.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> It's relevant to the political problem of defeating their opposition, sure, but not relevant to the merits of the policy. This seems... unlikely.
- consultant-hole 7y ago
- SkyPuncher 7y agoRaj was on Ezra Klien's podcast recently discussing this topic. Very much a similar discussion to this article, but they focus a bit more on the macro benefits. I felt like it was a really nice blend of political topics and data science. Raj seems to do a very good job of finding and conveying meaningful insights and statistics. https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show/can-raj-chetty-save-the-american-dream https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show/can-raj-chetty-...
- neighbour 7y agoI really cannot stand listening to Ezra Klein for more than 10 seconds but I enjoy Raj's work. Might have to slog through it.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIt’s a relatively labor-intensive intervention. But it worked. It was a high-touch intervention, but one with amazing results. Social issues need social solutions. Money may be needed to make it happen, but merely throwing money at the problem typically doesn't work. Tech can do a lot of good things, but tech solutions for social issues often fail. People problems are generally solved by the right kind of human involvement. The program doesn’t quite pay for itself by increasing future tax revenue, Hendren says — but it comes pretty close. I wonder how those figures look if you also include savings on future welfare programs and even incarceration.
- em-bee 7y agoexactly my thoughts. who would have thought that actually caring about people and showing them kindness would make a difference?
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThis is more like helping them bridge a culture gap. Once you actually live somewhere, you slowly acculturate by osmosis. But getting there requires some means to not only move physically, but also navigate a cultural transition. That's a fairly tall order. They got coaching for how to talk to landlords in better neighborhoods, they were fed information they didn't really know how to find and they were educated about various things. If you come from the right neighborhood, either your parents teach you a lot of that or you just pick it up without trying because you see it everywhere. If there is no one in your social circle who knows how to navigate certain things, it easily becomes an insurmountable barrier.
- jeffdavis 7y agoAgreed. It's also why federal programs are so ineffective: how can you possibly try to administer a fair and effective high-touch social assistance program across 330 millions people across very diverse localities? No, you need local programs that take into account local economic conditions, social situations, etc. I'm a libertarian at the federal level, but I'm much more receptive to local government interventions and have voted for local tax increases when I live a place that seems to be well-run.
- jefftk 7y ago> Hendren estimates that the lifetime benefit to a newborn child of moving from a low- to high-opportunity neighborhood is about $210,000 in additional income, or an 8.1 percent increase in lifetime earnings. Compare that to the $2,700 cost of counseling, and an additional $2,500 to $3,000 more per year per family that Section 8 paid due to higher rent in their new neighborhoods, and it looks like a pretty exceptional deal. The program doesn’t quite pay for itself by increasing future tax revenue, Hendren says — but it comes pretty close. This logic assumes that none of this benefit is positional. The family moves to a richer area, the kids do well in the fancy local schools, get into top colleges, make lots of money, etc, yes. But a lot of these opportunities look like "each year we take the best N people we can", so there are probably other (less qualified) kids who do slightly worse than they would without the move. As an analogy, if being in the tallest 5% of society makes you earn $100k more, we would expect a randomized controlled trial on increasing children's heights to have a large positive effect on income. But if we then rolled that out to the whole society those benefits would turn out to be illusory. This is still valuable from a perspective of reducing segregation and inequality, but I'm skeptical of its presentation as an extremely good deal economically.
- dcre 7y agoIf, as you suggest, the kids who move in do much better and the kids who are displaced do slightly worse, that does indeed sound like a very good deal economically.
- wutbrodo 7y agoI don't think that was an implication of the parent comment. As an example, Consider the toy zero-sum model where there are ten fixed outcomes. A kid is moved from outcome 10 to outcome 2, doing much better, but every kid from 2-9 is bumped down by one. By construction, there is no change in overall outcomes, but the oversimplified claims in the article that parent is complaining about would chalk that up as a huge +8 gain, by only checking one side of the ledger. As the parent and other sibling comments point out, the real advantage may come from positive-sum effects: reduxed inequality, a more efficient market from a leveled playing field, etc. But that doesn't change the fact that the math being used is too incomplete to be held up as an economic efficiency argument, the way the article does.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Causality1 7y ago>This time around, they linked the experiment to tax records and concluded that people whom MTO had placed in lower-poverty neighborhoods really were likelier to go to college and had higher average earnings than kids who didn’t move. Doesn't seem terribly surprising. The cultural atmosphere pervading low-income areas is not conducive to academic and financial achievement. Children who see strangers walking down the street at night are not going to have the same attitude towards school and behavior in general as children who see neighbors walking dogs in the morning. Garbage in, garbage out. ANY kid is capable of doing great when they're not surrounded by shit-heads.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoThere's a lot wrong with this comment, but: > Children who see strangers walking down the street at night[...] really stands out. I live in a busy neighbourhood, and there are lots of people on foot at all times of day. Yet I somehow doubt it's doing anything to my attitude to education. Just two nights ago, I actually started to talk to a group when they asked for directions, and two of them had physics PhDs. What a hellhole.
- wutbrodo 7y ago> Children who see strangers walking down the street at night are not going to have the same attitude towards school and behavior in general as children who see neighbors walking dogs in the morning. I'm fascinated by this view, and it's the first time I've ever heard it. Can you elaborate as to what you think the connection between seeing strangers outside and educational drive is?
- Causality1 7y agoI don't believe I implied strongly enough that said mention of strangers referred to suspicious or dangerous-seeming persons.
- wutbrodo 7y agoAh yea, that's sort of where I was expecting your comment to go, but as written, it just seemed like an indictment of exposure to people you don't know. Thanks for clarifying.
- brendenw 7y agoI live in north Seattle. There is a tremendous amount of misleading information in this article. In fact, the neighborhoods mentioned as 'high opportunity' already have quite a lot of low-income, public, and section 8 housing. Yes, demand exceeds availability, but that's true anywhere in Seattle.
- nutellatoast 7y agoWondering if you could go into greater detail about what you found misleading. I'm from Seattle and nothing really stood out to me that way.
- evrydayhustling 7y agoSuggested title replacement: "Moving vouchers as an effective tool against poverty". Really interesting article and topic, but title is clickbaity.
- ap3 7y agoDidn’t Freakonomics tackle this subject and concluded that school doesn’t make that much of a difference in results and it was more about each persons makeup?
- Animats 7y agoWorth doing, but it only serves the deserving poor. What about the undeserving poor, which includes most of the druggies? I'm one of the undeserving poor, that's what I am. Now think what that means to a man. It means that he's up against middle-class morality for all of time. If there's anything going, and I puts in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "you're undeserving, so you can't have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widows that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same 'usband. I don't need less than a deserving man, I need more! I don't eat less 'earty than 'e does, and I drink, oh, a lot more. - From My Fair Lady / Pygmalion.
- abdullahkhalids 7y agoUnless, they started doing drugs, or whatever else you consider immoral or that which deserves poverty, by choice from the day they were born, society failed to raise them as good humans.
- rtpg 7y agoIt kinda sucks that the tone of this article ("you should have an objective of moving out of your not-so-great neighborhood to the rich neighborhood") is basically the position that we've ended up on for fighting disparities. Maybe busing should become a thing again... get everyone motivated to fund _all_ schools properly and not just have dumb magnet schools
- autarch 7y agoIt's not just school funding. It's the classmates the child has in school, the extra curricular opportunities unrelated to school in the neighborhood, the lower incidence of crime (especially violent crime), lower levels of environmental pollution, safe places to play outside, and so on and so forth.
- timwaagh 7y agoWhen I read the title, I was thinking there is another tool. That tool might be homelessness. The homeless do not care after all whether they sleep in a posh uptown or a run down ghetto. If there are enough of them opportunity levels would surely equalize as median income of inhabitants averages out to zero.
- malandrew 7y ago> And as is usually the case in the US, the racial divide is also an opportunity divide. > Living in certain neighborhoods seems to expand opportunity, and living in other neighborhoods seems to diminish it. What I don't get about these policies is that they do zero to actually address the problem and instead just shift things around. If you have good neighborhood A and bad neighborhood B, taking a handful of people from B and relocating them to A does nothing to actually address the problems in B for those that remain in B. B continues to B bad. The solution that should be pursued is how to make B as good as A. Once B is as good as A, people from B will naturally migrate to A and people from A will migrate to B. This is essentially what gentrification accomplishes. The problem with gentrification is that is pushes people in B out to some other bad neighborhood C. It seems to me that this being the case, the ideal scenario is to figure out how to gentrify B without displacing those in B to C. What you want is good influences found in A to dilute the bad influences in B until the bad influences are extinguished.
- Shivetya 7y agoOur cities did not used to be so divided but this was the direct outcome of Roosevelt era polices which actually forced it. The FHA when created would not insure mortgages for blacks and went to far to finance new subdivisions for whites only - requiring that no blacks be allowed to buy. Legal unionization allowed exclusion of low skilled labor which effectively pushed nearly a half million out of jobs and thereby out of their homes. Throw in how most New Deal recovery efforts were only aimed at states the Democratic party needed votes in and this lead to the exclusion for any funds to help poor blacks in the South. The FHA created this mess and on purpose. It simply comes down to politicians constantly trying to focus the ire of the people on those who did not cause it so as to keep people divided and the situation perpetuated. Want to fix housing segregation and outcomes, get politicians out
- Symmetry 7y agoFHA policy had a lot to do with neighborhood segregation but we shouldn't ignore the role of community violence directed against black families trying to move into white neighborhoods either. Black owned houses in certain areas really did tend to burn down and that's a huge indictment of the people who lived there and the local governments who were unwilling or unable to do something about it. So while the federal government deserves blame there's plenty to go around.
- Dowwie 7y agoYou can fight the tide with the help of someone looking after you and helping keep you on the straight and narrow. Parenting and life at home have a far greater influence on a child's future than the neighborhood does. The real opportunity zone is the one under the roof.