Federal Urban Policies

As the federal government, localities, and housing authorities seek to revitalize scarred inner-city neighborhoods, a unique set of responses is needed to aid public housing's most vulnerable families. The Chicago Family Case Management Demonstration may have some innovative answers.

Despite substantial progress since passage of the Fair Housing Act four decades ago, neighborhoods remain highly segregated by race and ethnicity. This paper summarizes existing research evidence on both the costs of segregation and the potential benefits of neighborhood diversity. It uses decennial census data to show that a growing share of US neighborhoods are racially and ethnically diverse, but that low-income African Americans in particular remain highly concentrated in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Because the dynamics that sustain segregation today are complex, strategies for overcoming them must address not only discrimination, but information gaps, affordability constraints, prejudice, and fear.

HOPE VI supports demolishing large, dilapidated public housing and replacing it with smaller-scale, more appealing properties. What makes this feasible (mixed financing; private-sector entities; and mixed-income, mixed-tenure complexes) also creates conditions that challenge and can undermine long-term sustainability. Sustainability has not yet been assessed and whether it should or can be assessed has been questioned. With input from housing practitioners and insight from a trial exploration of two HOPE VI redevelopments, this report demonstrates the need for, and feasibility of, conducting an assessment that can assist both private owners and public agencies in sustaining this valuable resource.

Every parent recognizes the inextricable connections between where we live and the quality of our children’s education. Although public policies have historically contributed to disparities in both neighborhood affordability and school quality, federal programs focused on affordable housing rarely take public schools into account and school officials typically assume that they have no influence over housing patterns. This paper focuses on four principles regarding the vitality and performance of schools and communities, discussing opportunities for constructive policy interventions, summarizing what we know about their likely effectiveness, and recommending next steps for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education.

This brief reviews recent social and economic trends in the ten metropolitan areas that form the context for the neighborhood programs being operated as a part of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections initiative. It finds that these areas are strikingly different along a number dimensions and in are many ways representative of the diversity in conditions and trends across America's metropolitan areas. Since 2002, for example, two of these areas attained among the nation's highest rates of employment growth (Denver and Seattle) while two others experienced serious declines (Oakland and Milwaukee). Although there were important differences in magnitudes, all sites did share in a number of trends: minority groups growing as a share of total population, improvements in several social indicators (e.g., in crime and teen pregnancy) but, disturbingly, notable increases in child poverty.