It’s also an experiment that has left participants with an overwhelmingly positive experience with a government bureaucracy for once. “This is the largest effect I’ve ever seen in a social science intervention,” Chetty said in an email. The experiment found that the additional support raised the share of families moving to high-opportunity neighborhoods from 14 percent to 54 percent. It’s a simple intervention - and, more than a year in, it looks like it yielded big results. They’d also be assigned “navigators” whose job it was to walk them through the apartment application process, and receive additional financial assistance with down payments if necessary.
They would also be given information on which neighborhoods promise the most opportunity for their kids, based on the research data. For this experiment, a random subset of people receiving vouchers for the first time would get more than just the rental subsidy. So in Seattle, the researchers put a twist on the housing voucher system. Why was that? And what could be done about it? (These are authorized by Section 8 of the Housing Act of 1937, and known as “Section 8 vouchers.”) The mystery for the researchers was that even after getting a subsidy, many families chose not to move to a better area that offered better opportunity.
The way housing assistance normally works in major cities is that housing authorities have limited budgets that they use to distribute money for rent to a subset of needy families. Many neighborhoods in the suburb of Bellevue were identified as “high opportunity” zones by the Harvard study, which used block-level data to identify the top third of neighborhoods by income mobility. A team of researchers - Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Larry Katz, Stefanie DeLuca, Peter Bergman, and Christopher Palmer - collaborated with the Seattle Housing Authority (which distributes Section 8 housing vouchers in the city) and the King County Housing Authority (which distributes them in surrounding suburbs) to try something new. Now a new project, a continuation of those previous studies, seeks to use those lessons to improve American housing policy. Research by some of the same economists confirmed a causal link: Living in certain neighborhoods seems to expand opportunity, and living in other neighborhoods seems to diminish it. But if you went farther south, particularly to the Central District (the historic home of Seattle’s black community, pre-gentrification at least), you start to see averages more like $24,000, or $25,000, or $29,000. In some North Seattle neighborhoods (like Broadview), children who grew up there in the 1990s were earning average incomes of around $53,000 by their mid-30s. Research released by a group of economists last year confirmed this impression in more detail. The north is richer and has more expensive houses and higher-ranked schools than the south.
In Seattle, the divide runs north to south: North Seattle is largely white South Seattle is largely not.Īnd as is usually the case in the US, the racial divide is also an opportunity divide. Most American cities have a stark racial divide.
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