NEW YORK TIMES: …The Obama administration has taken a deep interest in the research of the Harvard economist Raj Chetty, who has shown that where children grow up shapes their prospects as an adult, and the proposed expansion of the Dallas experiment is an early instance of the ways in which Mr. Chetty’s findings are changing public policy.
Housing vouchers were created in the 1970s to help poor families and their children escape public housing, but they largely failed to improve the prospects for their recipients. Many of the 2.2 million households that are receiving them at any given moment, particularly minorities, remain clustered in low-income neighborhoods in what amount to virtual housing projects.
Julián Castro, the secretary of housing and urban development, said it was past time to try a more daring approach, one that pushes harder against age-old residential patterns of class and racial segregation. Even so, he said, the measure of the new changes would not be how many people left those clusters but whether their lives were changed for the better… (more)
EDITOR: As we discussed previously concerning the large reservoir of vacant suburban apartments, what is desired above can be achieved locally by allowing families to pay the difference between Section 8 government rental subsidies and market rental rates. This is how matters are successfully handled in New Jersey.
