Tickets to a much better future

It was one of those rare moments of bipartisanship in Washington: Republican and Democratic legislators who agree on little seemed to concur, only months ago, that helping poor families escape poor neighbourhoods was one path to making poor children’s futures brighter.

The House approved — and the Senate is considering — a housing programme that will help determine the most effective ways of assisting low-income families move to neighbourhoods with better housing, better schools, better jobs and better transport.

So far only the House has approved funding for the programme, the Housing Voucher Mobility Demonstration Act. It would provide about 2,000 additional housing vouchers for families with children who would participate in the demonstration programme. At the moment, the housing choice voucher programme serves 2.2-million households, subsidising rents so they typically do not exceed 30% of a recipient’s income. To date $50m has been approved for the demonstration project, mainly to pay for services to help families find out about housing in better neighbourhoods and to move to those areas.

Young people whose families used vouchers in a federally designed experiment in the 1990s to move from deeply impoverished neighbourhoods to communities with more opportunities grew up to be better educated and to have higher incomes, according to a 2015 study by three Harvard economists.

Relocation drove up the adult earnings of these children in all five cities involved in the study — a finding that held true for whites, blacks and Latinos, as well as for boys and girls. The longer children lived in better neighbourhoods, the greater their eventual gains.

The Harvard study showed that taxpayers as a whole benefit when poor families with children migrate to such communities, with tax revenues that flow from rising incomes possibly offsetting the cost of vouchers. New York, September 12