The experience with the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, and other mobility programs around the country including Moving to Opportunity, shows that housing mobility is one of the best tools we have for reducing concentrated urban poverty and affording justice to those trapped within it. Together with others, BPI is working to create a new national housing mobility program stemming from the successful Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program. The idea springs from a proposal in a recently published book by BPI’s Alexander Polikoff, Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto.
The proposed new program would target the neighborhoods with the most severely concentrated poverty in approximately 15 metropolitan areas, allocating 50,000 Housing Choice Vouchers annually to families who want to move. It would build on the lessons of the Gautreaux program, Moving To Opportunity, and other successful mobility programs, and would operate separately from the regular Housing Choice Voucher program.
While such a program would not solve all of our low income housing problems, it could substantially reduce poverty concentrations in the poorest urban communities in our nation, with a fairly modest investment of funds. Political will, not cost, is likely to be the greatest obstacle to such a program.
More information on Housing Mobility:
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