
Economist Raj Chetty has found a surprising tool to fight housing segregation - MaysonL
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/4/20726427/raj-chetty-segregation-moving-opportunity-seattle-experiment
======
jefftk
_> 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.

~~~
noneckbeard
This is a very zero-sum take on the project, where it’s very possible that
creating more diversity in the neighborhoods these families are moving to
raises the level of education and outcomes for everyone involved. Making some
people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.

~~~
draugadrotten
> Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.

On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a requirement to happen. Making some
people smarter can actually have a negative effect on the smarter ones.

This can be illustrated with schools, where it benefits the troublemakers to
be placed in a group with calm children, but it is on the expense of the calm
children who will now be disrupted in their studying. In the scandinavian
countries, this is often done to children. Troublemakers, most often boys, are
placed together with groups of calm children, often girls. This is such a
common practice that there is an expression for such girls - pillow girls,
"kuddflickor".

[https://translate.google.se/translate?hl=sv&sl=auto&tl=en&u=...](https://translate.google.se/translate?hl=sv&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skolaochsamhalle.se%2Fflode%2Fskolpolitik%2Fgunnlaugur-
magnusson-om-kuddflickor-och-inkluderingsprincipen%2F)

That said, isn't the Chetty proposal (moving from low-opportunity location to
higer-opportunity location) basically why there are millions of migrants in
Europe right now.

~~~
DoreenMichele
It may not be as straight forward as you seem to think it is.

Girls are generally expected to be better behaved. This can be extremely
suffocating and unhealthy.

If they are exposed to "troublemaker" boys and learn to have a little back
bone and stand up for themselves (to possibly oppressive adults), it's still
less socially acceptable for a girl than for a boy. So then she blames the
"troublemaker" boy to cover for herself because he will get in less trouble
than her and that's what the adults find plausible anyway.

It's entirely possible that even if she tried to accept the blame, the adults
would interpret that as her trying to be kind to him and cover for him.

~~~
hueving
The post is about Norway.

------
SkyPuncher
Raj 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-...](https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show/can-raj-chetty-save-
the-american-dream)

~~~
neighbour
I really cannot stand listening to Ezra Klein for more than 10 seconds but I
enjoy Raj's work. Might have to slog through it.

------
tomasien
There 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
Indeed. 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
Racial 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.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Not 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.

------
paraxion
I'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-
su...](https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/the-suburbs-
bearing-the-brunt-of-perth-s-public-housing-20190306-p5124q.html)

That said, there's been some notable kerfuffles when "rich" suburbs didn't
want their allocation.

~~~
ajdlinux
Over 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-
housi...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-15/canberra-public-housing-
inner-city-reduction/11113346)

~~~
chii
also, 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).

~~~
rory096
In the United States, projects applying for Low Income Housing Tax Credits
actually get a 30% _boost_ in their subsidy if they're in qualified low-income
Census tracts.

------
DoreenMichele
_It’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.

~~~
jeffdavis
Agreed. 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.

~~~
Firadeoclus
> 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.

That's an interesting take, but would you agree that it's often the places
that aren't particularly well-run that also have the most need for
interventions? What if federal programs were conceived as high-touch
assistance programs for local government?

~~~
jeffdavis
What form would that assistance take? Kicking bad politicians out? Rewriting
bad laws? Investigating crimes, arresting and prosecuting criminals? Picking
up the trash?

No, that would just eleminate the idea of a local government. The only thing
they can really do is throw money around, or some glorified variation thereof.

Centralizing power is risky (a lot of things can go wrong), ineffective, and
promotes division.

Imagine Congress deciding on one kind of car for everyone in the country --
people in manhattan don't want any car, people in the suburbs want a sedan,
outdoor people want a truck, etc. It would be a huge argument dividing
everyone in the country into factions and nobody would be happy. It sounds
ridiculous, but that's what happens to a small extent with each new federal
law that gives more power to the central government. And look what's
happening.

------
rtpg
It 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
It'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.

------
malandrew
> 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.

------
brendenw
I 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
Wondering 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
Suggested title replacement: "Moving vouchers as an effective tool against
poverty". Really interesting article and topic, but title is clickbaity.

------
thaumasiotes
> 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
I 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
Wow. I have trouble seeing how that could possibly be called a "stark racial
divide".

~~~
jcims
This map might make it easier to see.

[http://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/](http://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/)

~~~
Ericson2314
The is an amazing map, but like so many such maps as you zoom out you loose
the dynamic range to capture the difference between populated countryside and
city.

------
ap3
Didn’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?

------
Shivetya
Our 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
FHA 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.

------
Animats
Worth 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
Unless, 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.

------
Dowwie
You 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.

------
alexashka
> 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?

------
timwaagh
When 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.

------
consultant-hole
I’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?

~~~
john_brown_body
Who 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
You don't often see the argument that understanding the nature of opposition
to something isn't relevant to overcoming that opposition.

~~~
john_brown_body
It'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
> It's relevant to the political problem of defeating their opposition, sure,
> but not relevant to the merits of the policy.

This seems... unlikely.

------
Causality1
>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.

~~~
wutbrodo
> 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
I don't believe I implied strongly enough that said mention of strangers
referred to suspicious or dangerous-seeming persons.

~~~
wutbrodo
Ah 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.

