A recent CityLab article cited new research from economist Timothy Bartik of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research saying, “Targeting places can sometimes be the best way to help people.”

It is not hard to get people in the US to agree that there are neighborhoods with more opportunities than others, but it can be difficult to get people to agree on how to bridge this gap of neighborhood inequality. 

Well-known researchers like Raj Chetty have seen positive gains for children who were moved out of high poverty neighborhoods, but even Chetty admits that the US cannot move every child. His website even states, 

Of course, helping families move can never be a scalable solution to improve upward mobility in and of itself; ultimately, we must make investments to make all communities areas of opportunity. 

Moving every child in poverty out of his or her neighborhood would be an impossible feat. Not to mention that when cities experience outmigration, other problems arise like loss of economic vitality, declining property values, etc. Sure, there’s plenty of available, cheap housing, but only because the people who live there are stuck, left behind in poverty.

But these issues are exactly what makes place-based solutions so powerful. As new research confirms, there are economic and social gains when people can stay in place and benefit from improvements in neighborhoods where they already have an emotional connection. Richard Florida describes the problem with trying to move people this way,

Moving is hard on people, especially children. Losing proximity to friends and family takes its toll on well-being and life satisfaction. Anyone who has moved a lot (like me) knows that the communities we live in, and in which we forge social and business ties, create a special kind of location-specific capital that is very hard to replicate in a new place. A wide body of research, some of which I have covered here, shows that the opportunity and psychological costs of moving are substantial, with estimates in excess of $100,000 for every close family member or friend left behind, and typically in excess of a year of income.

What is a better way of serving these families? A solution like Neighborhood Hope Scholarships is a well-designed, place-based policy that could help renew a distressed community without requiring families to move away from their homes for better opportunities. How? We know that the quality of an assigned school impacts the vitality of a neighborhood.

To reverse this growing inequality that is created by assigning children to a school based on their home’s location, communities should put in place these school scholarships which allow all families living in low-income communities the option to attend the school of their choosing. With this opportunity available, families with children would no longer avoid the distressed neighborhood. Businesses seeking to sell goods and services to the growing community would follow - bringing private investment dollars and creating jobs for parents and local residents. 

Positive neighborhood effects of school choice programs are now well-documented in academic studies, but until now, no scholarship program has been designed as a place-based policy specifically to promote community growth. Academic studies show that programs like Neighborhood Hope Scholarships will produce benefits beyond job creation and classroom improvement - including increased social cohesion, reduced neighborhood disorder, and reduction in crime. 

The core idea behind Neighborhood Hope Scholarships is a simple one and is the type of policy Batik’s research supports; target distressed communities with the broadest and most flexible educational option available, and the result will be improved communities, improved education outcomes, and of course, improved lives.