Can transforming neighborhoods help kids escape poverty?

改造社区能否帮助孩子们摆脱贫困?

Planet Money

2026-01-29

27 分钟
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In the 1990s, Congress created HOPE VI, a program that demolished old public housing projects and replaced them with more up-to-date ones. But the program went further than just improving public housing buildings. HOPE VI was designed to transform neighborhoods with concentrated poverty into neighborhoods that attracted people with different incomes. Some people who moved to HOPE VI neighborhoods earned too much to qualify for public housing. And some even paid for market-rate housing. The idea was that this would help create new opportunities for the low-income people who lived there and even lift people out of poverty. For years though, there wasn’t a clear answer to whether this approach actually succeeded. A new working paper from Raj Chetty and the team at Opportunity Insights finally provides some answers. On today’s show: Who really benefits when people living in poverty are more connected to their surrounding communities? Are there lessons from the HOPE VI experiment that could apply to other kinds of policies aimed at fostering upward mobility? More about Opportunity Insights’ study and a link to their interactive map here. Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift. / Subscribe to Planet Money+ Listen free: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts. Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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  • Weissina Williams still remembers the day she went to go watch a public housing tower near where she lived in North Philadelphia get knocked down.

  • I assume there was gonna fall over.

  • So I don't know how it's like you heard dynamite like six times go off.

  • Then it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

  • The tower was part of a development called Cambridge Plaza.

  • Weissina and some friends had walked over to see just what happened when you blew up a 14 story building.

  • We was like always gonna come down on us and all this other stuff No, actually it came down,

  • but it came that's probably so much That's why they say so much smoke comes up

  • because it just like smashed itself down that demolition was part of this massive federal program started in the early 1990s called hope six Congress wanted to do something to deal with all of these incredibly rundown public housing projects around the country.

  • Hope 6 provided money to demolish hundreds of those projects and,

  • in a lot of cases, to replace them with newer and better buildings.

  • Weissina, she herself lived in public housing.

  • She grew up in a low-rise development nearby called the Richard Allen Homes.