Another landmark study from Raj Chetty and colleagues: We are indebted to Professor Chetty and his co-authors not only for their dramatic 2016 finding that children who move from high poverty to low poverty neighborhoods when they are young have dramatically improved outcomes as adults, but also this week: in another big data review of “social capital,” Chetty and his team have dug deeper to get closer to the mechanisms that drive these outcomes – and it’s all about real integration: bringing children together within communities, schools, and institutions, and across class differences. Chetty’s findings have crucial lessons for federal housing programs, housing mobility policy, and school integration policy, and we will continue to focus intensively on these policy implications over the next year. You can read the Opportunity Insights non-technical summary of the research here.
Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing in the Community Reinvestment Act: We submitted comments this week on the proposed comprehensive revisions of the Community Reinvestment Act regulations, urging the federal banking regulator agencies to align CRA with the principles of the Fair Housing Act – for example, giving substantial CRA credits to banks for investing in affordable housing in high opportunity areas, not just in low income neighborhoods.
The 2023 budget so far: The House and Senate Appropriations Committee have released their 2023 appropriations bills, which will eventually be reconciled and voted on after the midterm elections. On several issues we’ve been working on, we had been very excited by the House bill, but disappointed by the Senate response. For example, in the House bill, we were pleased to see $100 million approved for a Fostering Diverse Schools grants program at the Department of Education, a key priority of NCSD, and $25 million for competitive grants for housing mobility services at HUD – both of which were absent from the Senate bill. Likewise, the expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher program in the House was dramatically scaled back in the Senate. One piece of good news from the Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee is that they are proposing to eliminate the final prohibition on the use of federal funds for transportation to support school integration (almost no one knew about this final provision when we worked to successfully eliminate the more obvious anti-busing budget riders and provisions in prior appropriations bills). Next step is to continue to push for restoration of funding for new vouchers, mobility services, and school integration planning grants in the final budget bill this fall, as the House and Senate committees work out their differences. If you have a Senator on the Appropriations Committee, feel free to reach out!
More evidence for source-of-income discrimination laws: Professor Ingrid Ellen (of PRRAC’s Social Science Advisory Board) and her colleagues (including former HUD Assistant Secretary for Research Kathy O’Regan) have published Advancing Choice in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: Source of Income Protections and Locational Outcomes, demonstrating positive impacts of SOI laws in 31 jurisdictions, including increased access for existing voucher families to low poverty neighborhoods, with increased racial integration in those communities also projected.
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