Planning for Opportunity: How Planners Can Expand Access to Affordable Opportunity Bargain Areas

Journal of the American Planning Association. 2022. Nicholas Kelly and Ingrid Gould Ellen.

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings

Although there is strong evidence that living in high-opportunity neighborhoods can improve the long-run educational and economic outcomes of children, translating this into practical advice for planners is difficult. There is little consensus about how to operationalize neighborhood opportunity, and planning discussions rarely consider how much that opportunity costs, even though planners around the country must grapple with the typically higher cost of providing housing in opportunity areas. We offer concrete guidance to planners about how to best overcome these barriers. We argue for a streamlined measure called the school–violence–poverty (SVP) index based on three contemporary metrics that research shows enhance economic mobility for children: school quality, violent crime, and poverty. Combining the SVP index with data on rental prices in New York City (NY) and Greater Boston (MA), we identified a collection of high-opportunity bargain neighborhoods with lower rents than expected given their opportunity metrics and housing characteristics. We found that high-opportunity bargain areas tended to be more affordable because they lacked amenities such as restaurants and proximity to the city center that are associated with higher rents but are unlikely to be very related to children’s economic mobility.

Takeaway for practice

Here we provide a streamlined, easy-to-use index for planners to identify high-opportunity bargain areas in their communities. It has direct implications for planners attempting to stretch limited budgets by helping planners decide where to get the most opportunity for their taxpayer dollars when building affordable housing and how to empower low-income families to weigh tradeoffs about where to live and achieve better neighborhood matches. The simplicity of the index can empower families to access areas that are more affordable and offer robust public services for their children.

Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America’s Neighborhoods

Edited Book, Temple University Press. 2021. Editors: Justin Steil, Nicholas Kelly, Lawrence Vale, Maia Woluchem

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The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule was the most significant federal effort to increase equality of access to place-based resources and opportunities, such as high-performing schools or access to jobs, since the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, in an effort to appeal to suburban voters, the Trump administration repealed the rule in 2020, leaving its future in doubt.

Furthering Fair Housing analyzes multiple dimensions of this rule, identifying failures of past efforts to increase housing choice, exploring how the AFFH Rule was crafted, measuring the initial effects of the rule before its rescission, and examining its interaction with other contemporary housing issues, such as affordability, gentrification, anti-displacement, and zoning policies.

The editors and contributors to this volume—a mix of civil rights advocates, policymakers, and public officials—provide critical perspectives and identify promising new directions for future policies and practices. Placing the history of fair housing in the context of the centuries-long struggle for racial equity, Furthering Fair Housing shows how this policy can be revived and enhanced to advance racial equity in America’s neighborhoods.

Can Housing Search Innovations Facilitate Moves to Opportunity? Results from Two Randomized Controlled Trials

Working Paper. Nicholas Kelly. Email nkelly@alum.mit.edu for working paper

I evaluate the impact of two policy changes on increasing access to opportunity: a randomized controlled trial of a housing mobility counseling program, and a randomized controlled trial of a housing search tool that provides customized neighborhood recommendations based on public transit access, school quality and public safety preferences. I find that rental subsidy changes were associated with higher numbers of moves to areas with better schools, as well as the percentage of families moving to areas with high performing schools and low rates of violent crime and poverty. I also find the housing mobility counseling program increased access to areas with lower violent crime rates, and the housing search tool helped those in the treatment group already interested in moving to high-opportunity areas move to significantly higher opportunity neighborhoods.

All Policy Implementation is Local: How Housing Mobility Programs Explain Urban Bureaucratic Politics

Working Paper. Nicholas Kelly. Email nkelly@alum.mit.edu for working paper

How do city agencies implement regional policies? I propose a theory of urban bureaucratic policy implementation that argues that city agencies are an important vehicle for the implementation of regional policies due to their bureaucratic autonomy. I focus on two strategies these agencies use to facilitate implementation: reframing regional policy to align with the city’s interest, and redesigning policy to reduce political opposition. I test the theory by examining the implementation of “housing mobility” programs that help low-income families move to areas of opportunity in the United States, finding that reframing housing mobility from a desegregation policy to an upward economic mobility strategy facilitated implementation of regional policies by recasting it in the city’s interest.

Broken promises or selective memory planning? A national picture of HOPE VI plans and realities

Lawrence Vale, Shomon Shamsuddin, Nicholas Kelly. Housing Policy Debate, 2018. Government efforts to redevelop public housing often face a contentious gap between plans and realities. This paper compares 2014 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative data on housing unit counts and unit mixes for all 260 developments receiving Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) revitalization grants with data provided in the original HOPE VI grant award announcements. We find that HUD records undercount approximately 11,500 once-proposed units. The biggest changes were a 29% decline in the number of market-rate units and a 40% decline in homeownership units. The chief shortfall during implementation, therefore, was not with public housing units (although the HOPE VI program as a whole did trigger an overall decline of such units). To help elucidate the dynamics at play when the unit allocation shifts between initial grant award and implemented project, we include a series of five brief case studies that illustrate several types of unit change. Interviews with HUD staff confirm the baseline for record-keeping shifted during implementation once project economic feasibility became clearer; adherence to original unit mix proposals remained secondary. HUD prioritized its accountability to Congress and developers over its public law accountability to build the projects initially proposed to local community residents. Although these changes have sometimes been interpreted as broken promises, it is even clearer that HUD’s monitoring system exemplifies what we call Selective Memory Planning: when planners and policy makers, willfully or not, selectively ignore elements of previous plans in favor of new plans that are easier to achieve.

From Public Housing to Vouchers: No Easy Pathway out of Poverty

Book Chapter in the The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates About Housing, Segregation and Opportunity. Lawrence Vale and Nicholas Kelly. 2016.

In the absence of stronger evidence that targeted vouchers restricted to low-poverty neighborhoods improve the well-being of families over and above place-based revitalization efforts, policy makers should not give up on public housing. Instead, they should focus on improving the physical conditions and management of public housing developments to make them once again truly decent places to live.

The Mutual Housing Experiment: New Deal Communities for the Urban Middle Class

Book review in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. 2017. Nicholas Kelly. Unable to purchase a home, yet ineligible for public housing assistance, many middle-class Americans fall through the cracks of U.S. housing policy. Rising rents in many U.S. cities, furthermore, put these individuals at great risk of displacement. As policy makers search for solutions to meet this growing problem, they would be wise to consider a failed and flawed attempt to provide middle-income housing more than six decades ago: the battle over cooperative housing in the United States. Kristin Szylvian’s The Mutual Housing Experiment traces the struggle to make cooperatives a key part of U.S. housing policy during and after World War II.