Thread by @JakeVigdor

ICYMI @NickKristof found "reason for hope" in a groundbreaking experimental study by @OppInsights. Go read if you haven't, then come back here for a contrarian thread: in broader context, this is a desert island of hope in a rising sea of despair.
nytimes.com/2019/08/03/opi…

@NickKristof @OppInsights The @OppInsights study showed that offering assistance to Seattle-area housing voucher recipients made them about 40 percentage points more likely to use their vouchers to rent an apartment in "high opportunity" neighborhoods.

Link to the study here:
opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/upl…

@NickKristof @OppInsights "High opportunity" in this case is defined as neighborhoods where low-income kids born 36-41 years ago wound up earning more money as adults. This matters critically. I'm going to refer to these as "neighborhoods historically associated with upward mobility" (NHAWUMs).

@NickKristof @OppInsights Suppose you're a low-income Seattle area family that read @NickKristof's article and became inspired to sign up for a housing voucher.

Bad news. Not only are there none available, the waitlist is closed and has been closed for 2+ years, both in Seattle and surrounding King Co.

@NickKristof @OppInsights The Seattle Housing Authority last admitted families to the waitlist by lottery in early 2017.

21,500 families competed for one of 3,500 spots on the waitlist.

84% of families in need walked away empty handed.

Similar story in King County.
seattlehousing.org/sites/default/…

@NickKristof @OppInsights So realistically, the family seeking help today would need to be extraordinarily lucky to receive that help within a year. For many, the wait for assistance would stretch to a decade, for some an entire generation.

In the meantime, you've got to survive on your own...

@NickKristof @OppInsights in one of the nation's most expensive rental markets, in a region with one of the nation's most severe homelessness crises.

Either that or leave the region entirely. As thousands upon thousands already have.

@NickKristof @OppInsights Leaving aside the tens of thousands of families with no hope of assistance due to underfunding of the housing choice voucher program, let's return to the ~80 families that wound up in a NHAWUM thanks to @OppInsights.

What would've happened to their apts. if they hadn't moved in?

@NickKristof @OppInsights Given the severe housing shortage in Seattle, it's hard to imagine these 80 apartments remaining vacant. Another family would have occupied them. The gains to the @OppInsights subjects are potential losses to these displaced families.

@NickKristof @OppInsights We might think that the @OppInsights subjects were needier, on average, than the families they displaced, or that they ended up in the neighborhood anyway. But with the incredible shortage of funding for low-income housing programs in the region, we really can't be sure.

@NickKristof @OppInsights Herein lies a fundamental limitation of the @OppInsights intervention: to a first approximation it is zero-sum, at least in regions with low vacancy rates. You can only offer a spot in a NHAWUM to a participant if you deny that spot to a non-participant.

@NickKristof @OppInsights Bear in mind, too, that past performance is no guarantee of future results. As @OppInsights states very clearly, we don't really know what the "special sauce" is that made NHAWUMs work a generation ago. There's no guarantee that the shelf life of that sauce exceeds 30 years.

@NickKristof @OppInsights .@NickKristof's piece highlights a NHAWUM in Renton, WA. Historically, Renton is a @Boeing company town, home of the 737. Boeing has long enjoyed a reputation as a good corporate citizen here. Is that part of the special sauce? Because Boeing's reputation is not trending well...

@NickKristof @OppInsights @Boeing .@OppInsights is using data that predates the @Microsoft boom in Seattle, let alone the @Amazon "prosperity bomb" that is simultaneously creating opportunity for skilled workers and making housing desperately unaffordable for others. Will this not alter the special sauce?

@NickKristof @OppInsights @Boeing @Microsoft @amazon The final catch-22 in @OppInsights work: what economists call "general equilibrium" effects. More colloquially, moving too many people into NHAWUMs may mess up the special sauce.

Meaning that this policy may only actually help people if it doesn't help too many people.

@NickKristof @OppInsights @Boeing @Microsoft @amazon The folks at @OppInsights are scholars I admire and they have done great work in uncovering how upward mobility varied across geographic locations for the generation born in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This study doesn't represent the highest and best use of this knowledge.

@NickKristof @OppInsights @Boeing @Microsoft @amazon Rather than dream up ways to rearrange which families get to live in the limited set of places where the "special sauce" used to be...

We need to find the recipe for the "special sauce" and start cooking it everywhere. That would be an undeniably positive-sum intervention.

@NickKristof @OppInsights @Boeing @Microsoft @amazon As social science, this is much harder work.

As policy, it's likely to be much more expensive.

But if we want to restore upward mobility in the United States, this is the more promising road to travel. /end