It’s a Beautiful Day in the Right Neighborhood

It turns out that your neighborhood affects your destiny. NPR reported on the results  of a twenty year study of children who came from similar backgrounds but grew up in different neighborhoods.  Those children were part of the “Move to Opportunity Program” that used housing vouchers to shift families out of public housing and into higher-wealth neighborhoods in the 1990s.

While initial results of the program showed little progress for the parents, the long term results show significant improvement for the children.  Those who moved had a greater likelihood of finishing school than did their peers who remained in public housing, and they had higher earnings.

The study leave a lot of questions unanswered, but makes clear that opportunity comes in a lot of different forms, and one of them is geography.