People Versus Place, People and Place, or More? New Directions for Housing Policy

Virtually all aspects of socioeconomic inequality in the United States are organized in space (Sampson, 2012). The spatial organization of inequality is, in part, simply a manifestation of inequality occurring at the levels of individuals, families, and groups that is mapped onto spaces through market processes. However, spatial inequality also is due to intentional efforts to organize physical space through state action in ways that maintain or reinforce inequality (Dreier, Mollenkopf, & Swanstrom, 2004). As a result of both sets of processes, there is tremendous variation in economic status, education and labor-market opportunities, institutions, environmental hazards, and social networks across city blocks, neighborhoods, municipalities, metropolitan areas, and regions.

Well-documented trends in rising household income and wealth inequality are mirrored by trends in the degree to which low- and high-income families live apart from each other, as measured by economic segregation (Bischoff & Reardon, 2014). Although the growth of isolated affluent neighborhoods is an important contributor to the rise of economic segregation (Reardon & Bischoff, 2011), much of the concern about the issue stems from the long-term rise of concentrated poverty. Jargowsky (1996, 2003, 2015) has documented, in a series of reports, trends in the proportion of all Americans and poor Americans living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40% or greater, showing substantial growth in concentrated poverty from 1970 to 1990, a decline in the 1990s, and a subsequent increase from 2000 to the most recent years in which data were available (2009–2013). Since 2000, the number of extreme-poverty neighborhoods has risen by over 75%, and the number of Americans living in such neighborhoods has risen by more than 90%, from 7.2 million to 13.8 million (Jargowsky, 2015).

Many studies have measured the connections between an individual child or adult’s exposure to concentrated poverty and a wide variety of subsequent negative outcomes (for recent reviews see Galster & Sharkey, in press; Sharkey & Faber, 2014). This literature increasingly supports the understanding that robust child development and adult opportunities for U.S. low-income households will be compromised in numerous aspects by the comprehensively deprived residential environments that they typically confront. For recent studies that provide plausibly causal estimates of the negative effects of neighborhood deprivation on many child and adult outcomes in the United States, see Chetty, Hendren, and Katz (2015), Galster, Santiago, and Lucero (2014, 2015), Galster et al. (2014, 2016), Galster, Santiago, Lucero, and Cutsinger (2016), Sanbonmatsu et al. (2011), Santiago et al. (2014), Sharkey (2010, 2013), Wodtke (2013), and Wodtke, Harding, and Elwert (2011). The impacts of such places are so pernicious that they bind people to them over multiple generations (Sharkey, 2008, 2013).

These realities set the context for the longstanding debate among housing policymakers that is the topic of this focus issue of Housing Policy Debate. Should housing policy aim to assist low-income families in moving up and out of disadvantaged neighborhoods, or rather aim to improve the conditions of these neighborhoods so that low-income families can move up in place? As Erin Boggs points out (this issue), for decades the discourse on this topic has become increasingly factionalized, with policy advocacy positions calcifying between the increasingly insulated poles of people-based and place-based housing strategies.¹ Fortunately, (and perhaps predictably if one is Hegelian), this thesis–antithesis dialectic seems on the verge of producing a synthesis that builds on the strengths of both approaches and, hopefully, yields a new consensus. Always attuned to the latest developments, Dr. Keri-Nicole Dillman organized a panel at the November 2015 meetings of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management to summarize what we know about these two approaches and what syntheses might offer efficacious, equitable, and progressive ways forward toward systemic change. This focus issue of Housing Policy Debate is based upon presentations in that session, with articles subjected to rigorous peer review.

The two polar approaches to housing policy directed at low-income households in disadvantaged neighborhoods can be characterized as follows. The people-based strategy aims to increase the opportunities for low-income households to reside outside of deprived neighborhoods where, presumably, opportunities for socioeconomic advancement and quality of life are enhanced, while also increasing housing affordability and quality. It seeks to achieve this goal through a variety of housing-related programmatic components, including:

•	housing choice vouchers coupled with mobility assistance for families locating apartments, smoothly transitioning into and stabilizing their lives in advantaged places;
•	assisted housing located in advantaged neighborhoods (via scattered-site public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC], and nonprofit sponsored developments);
•	inclusionary zoning for major new construction/rehab housing developments in advantaged areas.

The place-based strategy aims to increase the quality of life and opportunities in currently deprived neighborhoods. It seeks to achieve this goal through a variety of housing-related programmatic components, including:

•	assisted housing in disadvantaged neighborhoods (via public housing, LIHTC, and nonprofit sponsored developments);
•	targeting of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Community Development Block Grant funds more narrowly into disadvantaged neighborhoods;
•	saturation employment and training efforts within current assisted-housing developments in deprived neighborhoods (Moving to Work, enhanced Family Self-Sufficiency);
•	affordable housing preservation strategies in formerly disadvantaged areas transitioning because of gentrification.

The years of debate have made it clear that neither strategy is without serious potential drawbacks. In the case of people-based housing strategies, the most serious challenges include concerns about individuals, origin neighborhoods, and destination neighborhoods:

•	Will vouchers alone provide sufficient means for low-income households to access many potential communities of opportunity, because of shortages there of rental units at fair market rents and/or unwillingness of landlords to participate in the voucher program?
•	Will adults and children moving into low-poverty neighborhoods significantly improve their chances for socioeconomic advancement?
•	Will those who move out of disadvantaged neighborhoods suffer from disruption of community ties and spatial isolation from their former bonding capital networks and formal social institutions that provided vital sources of resources, such as child care and incidental income, goods, and services?
•	How will parents who move far from their former neighborhoods of concentrated poverty successfully negotiate the difficult logistical challenges associated with increasing spatial separation of home, work, and daycare options?
•	Will those who move out of disadvantaged neighborhoods face social isolation or harassment from their new neighbors and classmates?
•	Will the most upwardly mobile and functional households be selectively siphoned off from poverty-stricken neighborhoods, thereby further eroding collective efficacy and social capital there?
•	Is the nature of negative social externalities emanating from concentrations of low-income households such that their spatial redistribution results in zero-sum social outcomes, with some neighborhoods gaining at the expense of others?
•	Will low-income households relocating from concentrated poverty neighborhoods merely form new concentrations of poverty elsewhere, thereby creating downward income succession and loss of property values in recipient neighborhoods?

Ann Owen (this issue) addresses several of these challenges in her holistic synthesis of research on housing vouchers to identify the impact of people-based assistance on four outcomes: residents’ neighborhood attainment, education, economic outcomes, and health. She finds, as do prior studies,² that generic vouchers do not substantially lead households to reside in places of substantially improved quality of life or opportunities. Despite the substantial income supplement that vouchers represent, they do not seem to yield significant improvements in a variety of outcome domains in general, perhaps because they have only limited spatial impacts and most voucher recipients remain severely economically deprived even after receipt. Owen reminds us, however, that positive outcomes clearly are contingent on both the specific components of the voucher program and the family context (including developmental stage of children) in which the program occurs.³ Owen also reviews the literature examining how vouchers affect places into which voucher holders move. The evidence on crime and property value impacts consistently shows that there are no negative consequences unless voucher holders exceed threshold concentrations in recipient neighborhoods. Unfortunately, under the generic voucher program it is clear that reconcentration of voucher holders is a frequent occurrence. The shortcomings of the mainstream people-based strategy are thus clear in Owen’s analysis.

In the case of place-based housing strategies, the most serious counterarguments include the degree to which low-income households will face continued handicaps by residence in targeted neighborhoods, and the political feasibility of sustaining the level of consistent, multisectoral investments and system changes required for meaningful/multidimensional improvement of deprived neighborhoods:

•	Don’t negative peer effects, socially counterproductive collective norms, and informal social institutions (i.e., gangs) in disadvantaged neighborhoods and schools militate against in-place programs reaping success?
•	Won’t the often extreme toxicity in the physical environment (especially air and lead pollution) place children from concentrated-poverty neighborhoods at a permanent disadvantage?
•	How can adding more low-income dwelling units to a neighborhood reconcile the consistent evidence that past the 15%–20% poverty threshold there is a disproportionate upsurge in social problems and concomitant rapid decline in property values?
•	Will employment prospects for residents of centrally located disadvantaged neighborhoods be attenuated by the increasing job mismatch in some metropolitan areas with suburbanizing employment and weak public transit systems?
•	Beyond dwelling production, how can housing policymakers change at once so many siloed institutional systems that contribute to the quality of life and opportunities in concentrated poverty neighborhoods, especially in situations where the encompassing jurisdiction is bankrupt?
•	How do we sustain the durability of place-based policies over multiple political cycles and regimes?
•	How do we avoid zero-sum outcomes, where improvements in one formerly disadvantaged neighborhood shift the flows of private resources away from other deprived neighborhoods?
•	How do we avoid enhancing the attractiveness of formerly disadvantaged communities in ways that encourage the displacement of the original, low-income residents or exclude them from resulting opportunities emerging in these places?

Keri-Nicole Dillman, Keren Horn, and Ann Verrilli (this issue) confront many of these questions in the context of the nation’s largest vehicle for delivering place-based assisted housing: the LIHTC. They summarize research evidence about LIHTC impacts on place across distinct neighborhood contexts—high-opportunity, distressed, and moderate-poverty neighborhoods. Again, the notion of contingency is brought to the forefront. Dillman, Horn and Verrilli find that developing LIHTC housing in distressed neighborhoods positively impacts the surrounding neighborhood in terms of modest property value gains and increased safety, but in higher opportunity neighborhoods it may yield small property value reductions and no impacts on crime. These results offer further support to the longstanding cautionary tale for people-based policy, given its goal of expanding affordable rental options in high opportunity places: we must do it right (i.e., small scale, not concentrated, well designed, well managed, etc.) to avoid negative impacts on high-quality target neighborhoods (Galster, Tatian, Santiago, Pettit, & Smith, 2003).

Is there a way to synthesize elements of both people- and place-based housing strategies so that their comparative strengths can be leveraged to gain maximum impact from our scarce housing policy public resources? Margery Austin Turner (this issue) offers several provocative insights in this vein. She advances a place-conscious strategy based on five principles: (a) develop citywide strategies that promote both redevelopment where needed and inclusion everywhere in the metropolitan area; (b) anticipate and plan for residential mobility and neighborhood change; (c) connect residents of poor neighborhoods to city and regional opportunities; (d) capitalize on the coming rental housing boom; and (e) use program and neighborhood data for continuous learning and accountability. Kathy O’Regan (this issue) also emphasizes this last vein, and Erin Boggs (this issue) builds the case for credible cost–benefit analyses of the long-term social costs of concentrated poverty to counter the short-term mindset of elected officials.⁴ Both O’Regan and Boggs also reinforce a central insight of Turner’s: the success of low-income people and the places where they live are interdependent, not mutually antagonistic.

The discussions in this special focus issue of Housing Policy Debate make it clear that further myopic advocacy of either a people-based or a place-based strategy for addressing concentrated poverty in American metropolitan areas is inappropriate and, perhaps, counterproductive. The intensity of this debate reflects the deep well of passion among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers regarding this topic, and arguably served an important function in bringing us to this point. Now, former adversaries should find common cause in merging elements of both approaches into a synthetic, place-conscious strategy that capitalizes on programmatic comparative advantages of both approaches, encourages efficacious modifications of both (such as suggested by Turner, Boggs, and O’Regan), and leverages emerging demographic forces and federal policy initiatives to accomplish systemic changes outside of the housing realm. Moreover, it is clear from the discussion that housing policymakers must think outside of their traditional silo and construct more holistic initiatives that link with other social policy silos like transportation, health, employment training, criminal justice, and income support. Of course, advancing this agenda will require enhanced capacity for collaboration and governance at all levels of government. Yet, as O’Regan emphasizes, the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation offers HUD for the first time some leverage in encouraging such. In sum, the punchline echoed by all authors here is: People-based or place-based housing policy? Both/and! And so much more.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, e.g., the online symposium and responses associated with Sampson (2015) and the roundtable discussion at the Urban Affairs Association annual meetings on March 17, 2016.

2. See the review in Galster (2013).

3. See complementary reviews about the contingency of neighborhood effects in Galster (2012) and Sharkey and Faber (2014).

4. For some prototype efforts in this regard, see Galster (2007) and Galster, Cutsinger, and Malega (2008).