How unfortunate

The lessons of HOPE VI provide a tantalizing clue about how social mobility can be engineered in America by building bridges between rich and poor.

gentrification should improve outcomes for kids, so long as it actually improves social integration

The empirical evidence for this is weaker than conventionally assumed.

This process often occurs without explicit governmental intervention or cost. The problem is that it is regularly dismissed as gentrification,

concentration of disadvantage and social isolation worsen the effects of material disadvantage.

31 percent higher incomes in adulthood (alongside improvements in college attendance and reduced rates of single parenthood).

poor children living in concentrated poverty—

Whatever their parents’ circumstances, the kind of neighborhood children grow up in substantially affects their life outcome, for better or for worse

social capital is just as important.

built a bridge to surrounding communities

But the new study,

False HOPE” argued that the new mixed-income model was “a social engineering scheme built on a number of inaccurate, irrelevant, and harmful assumptions about low income families and their neighborhoods.”

The program was controversial from the outset.

“Just giving people cash, just giving people education, doesn’t do as much as if you pair it with connections that then help them,”

A new, rigorous study

It was intentionally designed to reduce the isolation of the urban poor—and it’s succeeding.

Few places illustrate

Gates and windows lay shattered; residents complained of squalid living conditions; drug trafficking and gang violence were out of control.

less like a villainous process and more like a heroic one.

So long as gentrification brings rich and poor together, and offers the latter greater opportunity to take part in a healthy economy, it looks less like a villainous process and more like a heroic one.

The opposite might be true: