Can transforming neighborhoods help kids escape poverty?

Planet Money

NPR

News, Business

4.6 • 30.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, big news. Planet Money is going on tour to promote our first ever book.
0:06.5	It comes out in April and we'll be celebrating in about a dozen cities.
0:10.3	There's a limited edition tote bag that is included with your ticket while supplies last.
0:14.1	Details, dates, and how to get your ticket at planetmoneybook.com.
0:17.7	The link is in the show notes.
0:21.8	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:27.6	Wysina Williams still remembers the day she went to go watch a public housing tower
0:32.6	near where she lived in North Philadelphia, get knocked down.
0:36.2	I assume that it was going to fall over.
0:39.0	So I don't know how, like, you heard dynamites like six times go off.
0:41.8	Then it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
0:44.6	The tower was part of a development called Cambridge Plaza.
0:49.7	Wicina and some friends had walked over to see just what happened when you blew up a 14-story
0:54.9	building.
0:59.5	We was like, oh, it's going to come down on us and all this other stuff.
1:06.0	No, actually, it came down, but it came, that's probably so much, that's why they say so much smoke
1:10.1	comes up because it just, like, smashed itself down.
1:13.7	That demolition was part of this massive federal program started in the early 1990s called Hope Six.
1:20.5	Congress wanted to do something to deal with all of these incredibly run-down public housing projects around the country.
1:27.9	Hope Six provided money to demolish hundreds of those projects,
1:31.7	and in a lot of cases, to replace them with newer and better buildings.
1:35.6	Wicina, she herself lived in public housing.
	...

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