As the U.S. grapples with a housing affordability crisis, the single-minded focus of policymakers, practitioners and advocates alike is on boosting housing production to redress the radical mismatch between housing demand and supply that has emerged across the country. The metric of this era for decisionmakers, whether at the national, state or local level, is “housing units built.”

My strong conviction is that “units built” is not the only metric that the nation should focus on. The totalizing focus on “new units” causes us to lose sight of the impact that housing — its design, its location, its tenant mix — has on life opportunities and social progress.

A recently released study reminds us that a prior generation of housing policymakers, practitioners and advocates, caught in the grip of urban gang violence and inner-city poverty, were focused on a radically different set of outcomes: namely how to use the transformation of public housing to regenerate low-income neighborhoods and drive economic mobility for low-income residents and their children.

That focus resulted in the HOPE VI program, one of the most ambitious efforts to break up urban concentrations of poverty in U.S. history. From 1993 to 2010, the program invested $17 billion in public and private capital to revitalize over 250 high poverty public housing projects. The method of intervention was harsh and decisive: Funds were used to demolish and replace “severely distressed” public housing projects with developments that were mixed income and better integrated with surrounding communities and local schools. But the stated goals for people and places were worth the cost: long-term educational achievement, job placement and earnings and private investment.

In January, Opportunity Insights published a report examining the long-term effect of the HOPE VI program. Using sophisticated methodology and research techniques, the report made a series of blockbuster findings:

• “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.”
• HOPE VI had a measurable impact on the life opportunities and employment outcomes and earnings of children living in economically integrated developments. “Children raised in revitalized public housing units earned more, were more likely to attend college, and were less likely to be incarcerated.”
• The remarkable improvements in children’s outcomes were driven in large 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.”

Bundling these findings together, the report summarized as follows:

Together, these results indicate that distressed public housing projects were essentially islands that had limited social interaction with nearby communities. The HOPE VI program built a bridge to surrounding communities, allowing public housing residents to benefit from interacting with those residents. When those peers were higher-income, children gained more from the HOPE VI treatment, perhaps because of changes in their behaviors, aspirations, or connections to economic and social opportunities.

It is critical that we absorb the findings of this report, not just as evidence from a housing program of a bygone era but as guidance for future interventions as the U.S. gets serious about housing affordability.

Let me state at the outset: I am more than a passive observer, having been centrally involved in the design and enactment and implementation of HOPE VI. As Senior Counsel and then Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs, chaired by Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA), I worked with visionaries like Richard Baron and multiple colleagues in the U.S. House and Senate on drafting and shepherding the legislation. I then worked as Chief of Staff to Henry Cisneros, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help implement the program, again with a broad array of colleagues at HUD, OMB, Congressional Appropriations committees and constituency groups like the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities. I later served on President Obama’s HUD transition team in late 2008 and helped draft the Choice Neighborhoods program.

Yes, it is fundamental to build and produce more units. But housing is not a widget; it is a foundation for people (particularly children) to achieve their life’s potential and for places to offer opportunities to do so.

Cranston, Cisneros and other remarkable leaders like Senators Kit Bond (R-MO) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) focused intently and intensely on transformative change. They had been collectively influenced by the explosion of academic and popular writings that exposed the implications of inner-city poverty for cities, neighborhoods and residents. In 1987, William Wilson published his seminal work, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Soon after, Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land and Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here appeared, painting searing pictures of life in Chicago public housing. These books revealed the stark reality of concentrated urban poverty and emboldened policymakers to consider the most extensive reshaping of inner-city neighborhoods since the discrediting of urban renewal.

To redress the most visible sign of housing failure, these leaders hoped to catalyze the construction of a new form of affordable housing and, in the process, transform the physical and social landscape of some of America’s most distressed neighborhoods. Cisneros’ impact was particularly substantial. He literally brought the HOPE VI legislation to life by imbuing it with design ideas (e.g., new urbanism, defensible space) and financing innovations (e.g., leveraging HOPE VI resources with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits and other public and private capital) that were barely contemplated by Congressional authors. Given enormous latitude by President Clinton, he also expertly stewarded bipartisan support for the program during the period of extreme partisan division that followed the Gingrich revolution in 1994.

The ambitions of HOPE VI bear witness. As the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) stated in 1995:

A new form of public housing is being tested with HOPE VI … Instead of the superblocks of Cabrini Green, Richard Allen, and other public housing projects, traditional street grids are being designed. Instead of mammoth apartment buildings, small-scale, townhouse style housing is being constructed. Instead of acres devoted exclusively to housing, commercial activities are being encouraged. Instead of large, open pedestrian areas, small parks and squares as well as civic buildings like police and fire stations and daycare centers are being sited. Instead of housing built, owned and managed by public entities, partnerships with for profit and nonprofit developers are being forged. Instead of housing built for the poorest of the poor, economically integrated communities are being created.

Against this backdrop the Opportunity Insights report is reason for celebration. The proponents of HOPE VI demanded that economic integration become a central feature at HOPE VI sites across the country. They believed the ability to attract and retain a mix of tenants with different income levels would enable properties to be better managed and maintained over time, create a healthier social environment and bring better services, especially schools, to the surrounding neighborhoods. The Opportunity Insights research vindicates the hard, controversial decisions that were made decades ago to break up concentrated poverty.

The Opportunity Insights research also shows the importance of evidence-based policymaking. There is a direct thread that runs from William Julius Wilson’s seminal research in the 1980s to the work of Raj Chetty and others today. The commitment to objective data, consistent measurement and continuous improvement is fundamental if the current suite of housing interventions is to be successful.

It feels professionally rewarding to see this validation of legislative aspirations made more than three decades ago. But celebration only takes us so far. For the most part, I am deeply concerned that the conclusions of this report will sit on the shelf rather than inform a new burst of policy and program innovation.

I have four principal reasons for concern.

1. HOPE VI feels like it’s from a different world; it’s unlikely the program could even be enacted today. The bipartisan coalition of centrist Democrats and Republicans that moved this dramatic legislation in the early 1990s simply doesn’t exist. And Congress doesn’t have the patience or capability for the deliberative legislative processes that led to HOPE VI. Senator Cranston, for example, pushed the formation of two bipartisan national commissions in the late 1980s that focused on housing challenges in general and severely distressed public housing in specific.Yes, we do have bipartisan efforts like The Road to Housing Act and the 21st Century Housing Act, but these bills (and Opportunity Zones before them) focus on the arguably easier task of building new housing and simply do not have the breadth or depth of the legislation that drove Congressional action in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today’s legislation, rightfully, focuses on where the window of bipartisan dealmaking can be made. Unfortunately, this window does not permit addressing the complexity of social and economic issues touched by housing with the same ambition that HOPE VI did. I fear that the muscle memory for designing and delivering federal legislation equal to the larger housing challenges of the moment has been largely lost. For that reason, responsibility for addressing the nation’s housing challenges has mostly been delegated to states and localities and their private and civic allies.

1. Progressive policymakers and funders have elevated community engagement to be a virtual veto on redevelopment. While the impulse to engage communities grows out of the lessons and missteps from past eras (notably Urban Renewal), it can lead to a self-defeating fixation on getting the process “right.” The focus on process over outcomes often leads to nothing happening to the detriment of neighborhoods and residents alike. In many respects, the resistance to higher-income residents in inner-city areas strangely mirrors the suburban resistance to low-income residents. Homogeneity may be safe and even politically useful. But, in the long run, it is self-defeating.
2. The embrace of economic integration as a policy direction no longer has the hold on policymakers and practitioners today that it did in the 1990s. We should remember that HOPE VI was not the only program in that era which sought to de-concentrate poverty. To his credit, HUD Secretary Jack Kemp was a major proponent of economic mobility and advocated strongly for another highly effective program of the early 1990s, Moving to Opportunity. That demonstration provided a group of residents of high poverty public housing projects with vouchers but only allowed them to move to areas of low poverty. Researchers found that those families who moved experienced palpable health and mental health benefits.Regrettably, there are very few Jack Kemps anymore in the Republican Party, or in the Democratic Party for that matter. Many developers and investors who deploy the prime federal program in the country — the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program — are, for the most part, comfortable with building new affordable housing with little income diversity, often in neighborhoods of deprivation. They often do not consider access to neighborhood amenities and greater employment and educational opportunities when locating their projects. And they often don’t consider the impact of not embracing economic integration on cash flow and long-term operational sustainability.
3. The celebration of HOPE VI masks current day realities in many properties. The fact is that many HOPE VI projects are under severe stress and are physically deteriorating. The costs of operating projects have gone up due to rising insurance and energy costs. Meanwhile, there are few resources available for renovating properties and sustaining them for the long term. The irony of focusing on adding new affordable housing, nearly exclusively, while the nation loses units out the back door should not be lost on any of us. New production and asset management need to receive equal attention.

The Opportunity Insights analysis concludes with this (academically constrained) call to action:

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. We conclude 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.

I firmly echo this call. But the challenge today is not just to create another program; HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods, in the end, affected only a small portion of the nation’s housing inventory. Rather, we need to task ourselves to envision a new paradigm for the nation’s community and housing agenda.

Over 20 years ago, in a talk delivered for the centenary anniversary of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, I offered one perspective, the creation of “neighborhoods of choice and connection.” As summarized:

Neighborhoods of choice are communities in which people of lower incomes can both find a place to start and, as their incomes rise, a place to stay. They are also communities to which people of higher incomes can move, for their distinctiveness or amenities or location. This requires, first and foremost, an acceptance of economic integration as a goal of neighborhood and housing policy. It also requires a dynamic, market-driven notion of neighborhood change, rather than any “community control” vision dedicated to maintaining the status quo.

Neighborhoods of connection are communities which link families to opportunity, wherever that opportunity is located. This requires a new, profound, and sustained commitment to improving the “educational offer” in these communities and the cities in which they are largely located. It also requires a new, mature, and pragmatic vision of the changing “geography of opportunity,” particularly with regard to jobs and other housing choices.

Put the parts together, and this new vision treats people and place policies as fundamentally intertwined and mutually reinforcing.

This vision is not perfect for sure and needs updating. But, as the U.S. grapples with our housing affordability crisis, we must bring people and place-make into the mainstream of housing and community thought and action. Yes, it is fundamental to build and produce more units. But housing is not a widget; it is a foundation for people (particularly children) to achieve their life’s potential and for places to offer opportunities to do so.

Opportunity Insights has challenged us to think bigger and bolder. Let’s do it.

Bruce Katz is Founder of New Localism Associates and a Senior Advisor to the National Housing Crisis Task Force.

Corrections: U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs chair was Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA). Cisneros’ impact did not literally bring the HOPE VI legislation to life by imbuing it with design ideas, but those design ideas did enliven the legislation.

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