Research & Innovations

CLPHA convened the 10 Year Roadmap for Public Housing Sustainability to not only draw attention to the crisis created by the aging infrastructure of America’s public housing portfolio, but also to explore financial tools that can scale to the size of the need to preserve one of America’s most effective safety net platforms. The benefits of revitalizing public housing are numerous, from improved health, education, and life outcomes for millions of public housing residents to stronger neighborhoods and communities. In October, the Roadmap released the first preservation cost estimate in 15 years that it will cost $169.1 billion to preserve the nation’s public housing portfolio,

Now, Opportunity Insights, the highly regarded research organization on economic mobility led by Raj Chetty at Harvard University, has released findings from a generational study that affirms the Roadmap’s call for connection-based preservation of the national public housing portfolio. The study confirms that locating public housing in high-opportunity neighborhoods is a powerful way to break the cycle of poverty by improving life outcomes, especially for children.

The Opportunity Insights study finds for the first time that revitalizing a single public housing unit increases the future earnings of children who grow up there by $500K (adjusting for inflation and interest rates), far exceeding the cost of $188K borne by taxpayers of revitalizing a single unit. Each year of childhood that was spent in a HOPE VI-revitalized public housing unit raised children’s earnings in adulthood by 2.8%, and those living there from birth earned 50% more over their lifetimes. Further, children raised in revitalized public housing units are more likely to attend college and are less likely to be incarcerated.

These remarkable findings illustrate the vast benefits that will result from investing in public housing, as the 10 Year Roadmap proposes. The $188K average cost of revitalizing a single unit of public housing is the most cost-efficient option compared to rehabbing a LIHTC unit ($217K per unit), building a new LIHTC unit ($295K per unit), or building a new single-family home ($661K per unit). This is especially true when factoring in the future earnings increases of children who grow up in those revitalized public housing units. The $169 billion capital investment needed to revitalize the nation’s entire public housing portfolio will pay for itself via higher tax revenues resulting from higher earnings of children who grew up in revitalized public housing in high-opportunity areas, meaning this is a clearly worthwhile investment.