to build flexibility into our public housing programs as well i think innovative solutions are what we're looking for today and i'm certain some of you all or most of you all have great ideas on on that in terms of how to reach our but as a lot of our aging population lives in the rural areas certainly in my state we need to be able to help them meet the challenges that they have as they move into their elderly years and make sure that they're  that's facing a lot of families in public housing many factors have contributed to a shortage of housing public housing including insufficient federal funding and the demolition of without a new replacement joe in the waters has mentioned this committee has received testimony and i've heard from the public housing community in my district that public housing lacks sufficient staff and resources to perform inspections and maintain a building it is especially stressful in large urban areas including some cities in the north such as in my district in boston where the housing stock is older than in many parts of the country we know that additional stability and independent research support of the idea that a stable and clean place to live can serve as the foundation for self sufficiency and as we enter into new federally subsidized housing i'm interested in hearing more about the m will housing assistance families are given access to quality affordable housing in neighborhoods of greater opportunity yes self sufficiency increases significantly the first question i was asked to respond to was to describe my research on public housing in atlanta are mainly focused on how mixed income revitalization housing choices and public housing have affected families self sufficient i've examined twenty thousand administrative records for families who receive housing assistance from the atlanta housing authority between one nine hundred ninety five in two thousand and seven and more recently i completed an examination of twenty six thousand families who received housing the performance of elementary kids improve their families had access to browsers or lived in mid term development next i was asked to describe the transformation efforts in atlanta between one hundred ninety five and two thousand seven man a fully constructed thirteen in town development more than any other housing authority in the country in one thousand nine hundred five atlanta provided housing assistance to over sixteen thousand family forty seven percent of whom lived in public housing projects and thirty three percent of ours was by two thousand and seven atlanta provided housing assistance over seventeen thousand families fifteen percent of whom lived in public housing projects and fifty private development companies and i would have to defer to the management of the authority or authoritative answer to that but with regard to the second question that i have examined in my research around it in atlanta twenty one point four percent housing provider there are some axioms in the world of public housing and one of them is that public housing is at a crossroads and that's because public housing is always at a crossroads there are pretty basic reasons for that being the case the first and foremost reason is that our country is always changing that is no different today public housing policy is always been interesting because it's terrific indicator of where our country is public housing was very important to returning veterans during world war and it's going to be very important to the elderly and right now frankly with our aging population we're going to see demand increases for public housing and more accurately for affordable housing and one of the very large issues facing the issue of public housing is how we look at housing housing public housing has always been treated as something that is outside of the housing spectrum it is and other thing i disagree with that strongly i think public housing is well within the housing spectrum and needs to be considered within the housing spectrum moreover the focus i believe for many  housing practitioners is the issue of affordable housing and what is the supply of affordable housing how is that supply helping those who need it most know places that are more acute than in in the world of elderly housing and no place will be more acute and in our in our lifetimes i believe with with the state of our aging population another large issue is the changing nature of our nation's demographics much of our public housing stock was developed at a time when the population center was located in the northeast that is changing remarkably and the mortality for housing in the places where it's changing has typically not been public housing it's been for the last thirty plus years so issues that are very important to the north northeast and rightly important such as public housing in the obsolescence of public housing are far less important to places in the west than in the south where the routers are the typical mode ality for housing people who have the need to be housed this is going to drive a lot of the conversation but it begs a big question which is we've typically treated public housing in a particular way when we've decided one ago the public housing and this is not a one size fits all argument public but public housing is a particular kind of program the truth is that the the from a practitioner's perspective is that it is one part of a very large program that fits a lot of needs and that program deals with its needs in different ways in different parts of the country the driver here is always going to be whether the local government has the flexibility to function in order to address the needs of its particular community in the northeast it's going to be different than in west virginia or los angeles or for that matter in san bernardino which is just forty miles to the east of los angeles that driver is going to dictate a lot of how we deal with the issue of affordable housing generally and the subset of public out very quickly there is a tangential issue that it's i promise you that no one no none of my former colleagues professional colleagues that had asked me to do this but i'm going to do that shamelessly a big part of trying to determine the future of public housing is properly funding technology and public housing is driven by data and data currently is kept at high in ways that would be a technological generation ago a lot of excel congress to think about funding a solid technological platform for hud to provide that data to all of us to the american taxpayer to p h a s to this congress and to tenet with that madam chair  ranking member capitol thank you for your time thank you for the invitation and i stand ready to answer any questions you might  good morning madam chair ranking member capita and the distinguished members of the subcommittee thank you for this opportunity testified today for over a decade i've been involved as an evaluator in a variety of hope six and make some come housing programs around the south eastern united states and i've also been a part of an active community of scholars who share scientific findings with each other today on draw i draw on all of these to testify one of us know where the aspects of hope six program is addressed both place based goals around neighborhood revitalization and people based goals around economic self sufficiency wealth accumulation and general wellbeing among the most important lessons that we've learned from hope six is that any policy utilizing such a dual focus requires as much planning professionalism and follow through to create the enabling conditions for people to move up and out of pocket as it does to change the landscape by building housing in providing increased police patrol research shows that hope six has been very successful in most cases in providing decent affordable housing that is attractive and suits the needs of many low income families my own research in durham north carolina and in nashville tennessee show that residents are generally very satisfied and appreciate safe affordable quality housing so likewise research across the country does point to the fact that people who are able to qualify to move back in zero six three developments actually do experience a better environment living where there is less crime whether that be their perceptions or actual police records showing that is decreased however people are not all benefiting equally for two reasons first even when stakeholders claim that they equally support place based goals and people based goals the place based goals typically outpace people based goals and second hope six is being geared for a specific type of low income citizen namely those who have clear paths in mind to achieve their goals access to decent paying jobs relatively few barriers in their way and they view help such as providing quality income stabilized housing as a stepping stone on their journey but we know that evidence suggests the large majority of people in poverty do not fall into this category many low income families live in isolated poverty with multiple barriers to work and a lack of access to living wage jobs indeed hope six was designed to deal with this issue through the creation of mixed income communities but to date i would contend that there is little if any direct evidence that shows that living in a mixed income community has actually empowered low income residents to move toward economic self sufficiency certainly living and having access to quality affordable housing has helped that but living with near middle income families has not been shown to do that today these findings have prompted some people suggest that we are expecting too much out of a program hope six that we could do better or that we should  expect that people would move up and out of poverty in such a way that my research and my review of literature shows that perhaps part of the issue is that we haven't provided the authority to the people that we're trying to help to residents through community based organizations have more control over their homes and neighborhoods as well as the authority to lead and design hope six type neighborhood initiatives is likely these goals set would be addressed in a manner that mirrored the actual needs of the people that are the stakeholders the low income residents it is not my intention to say a public housing authorities are not capable of meeting the goals of hopes that rather i suggest they are we asking too much of them let them build on their strengths which are frequently related to developing and managing housing and other physical assets and let us instead turn to residents and community based organizations to lead the public private and nonprofit sectors toward the intertwined goals of neighborhood transformation and upward economic momentum for low income residents i have a set of policies suggestions that do stem from different research projects i'll state a few right now first thinking about the choice neighborhoods legislation that will be considered perhaps entities other the public housing authorities could be considered to be the recipients community based organizations that have long standing relationships with public and private organizations that have a track record of getting things done their second in terms of the governance of these types of initiatives residents do much better when they come to the table an equal footing too often i've heard stories from hope six where residents were asked to choose paint colors and give their feelings or input about the relocate but when it came down to the actual decision making they were not at the table so i conclude that there are a range of policy suggestions i suggest around this that might be able to empower residents to engender a greater commitment toward the communities and neighborhoods we're building and create the sustainability we're looking thank you madam chair members of the committee appreciate the opportunity to provide this testimony today as dr frazier noted the hope six program is designed to create two general types of benefits the first are community wide benefits it is in vision redevelopment will result in property values increase attraction of greater levels of private sector investment and improved neighborhood environmental reduction in crime and so on the program is also designed to provide individual level benefits for the residents of the public housing the idea here is that by relocating to better neighborhoods or moving into the finished redevelopment that these residents will have a reduced fear of crime and reduced risk of victimization they may even experience increased physical health and mental health and will achieve greater economic self sufficiency the academic research does to date shows modest success an impressive amount of success on the first of these objectives these community wide benefits studies across the country are shown that crime is reduced in neighborhoods that have undergone hope six transformation unemployment drops incomes in the neighborhood rise poverty decline as an overall increase in the level of education in the neighborhood property values increase the only cab to these generally very positive outcomes is that most of them are dependent upon population turnover it is incomes increase in the neighborhood and levels of education increase not because the existing right of the residents have improved their lot but because those residents have been replaced by more highly educated and higher income people at the individual level the research is much more mixed and the evidence of benefits to individuals is much more modest on the positive side virtually all studies show consistent and strong benefits in the form of a reduced fear of crime residents report less evidence of social disorder they report higher satisfaction with housing conditions with the exception of cost  but otherwise the evidence is really quite mixed there is the predominance of evidence shows no demonstrated benefits on employment on earnings on economic self sufficiency in fact there is evidence of greater economic insecurity among families who are displaced through hope six redevelopment there's no consistent evidence of health improvement this comes from the largest study in this respect of the urban institute five city panel study there is no consistent evidence of school related benefits for children there are mixed findings related to neighborhood satisfaction some residents are more satisfied in their neighborhood some are less satisfied some residents are more satisfied with certain dimensions of their new neighborhood and less satisfied with others there are significant and consistent findings however that displacement through six disrupts the social networks and the social support systems of lower income public housing families they experience and their children tend to report greater levels of social isolation fewer interactions with neighborhood with neighbors in their neighborhood a loss of a sense of community damage to the overall social capital limited individual benefits are problematic in and of themselves i think they're more problematic because of my current research which shows that hope six and public housing demolition in general tend to target projects with disproportionately high percentages of african american residents so my recommendations going forward these results i think  suggest a number of different changes in direction the first would be to stop further demolition of public housing as you noted in your opening remarks hud has demolished close to two hundred thousand units of public housing over the last fifteen to twenty years that's more than twice the number of units that the commission that led to the creation of hope six identified as being severely distressed as we continue to tear down public housing through hope six we tend to tear down units and projects that are more and more functional over time and this is reflected in the evidence of residents who are asked whether they want to move the majority of home saying no i would also suggest that given the positive outcomes of the physical redevelopment in hopes neighborhoods that we have perhaps come upon a good model for building more affordable housing so far from continuing to tear down public housing we should use the lessons of six to actually expand public housing we can we can build it in a mixed finance and a mixed income manner and we can be expanding the stock of affordable housing the demand for it of course still exists any redevelopment policy is going forward should limit displacement of families to all extent possible this means favoring rehabilitation over demolition means benefits the most from voluntary and force are those who want to move in the first place and federal policy should maintain an option for people who want to move out of public voluntary mobility understanding about the types of issues to look for and plan for finally capitalize on creative approaches to identify partnerships for client employment i go into more detail in my written testimony about this very innovative approach section sixty eight housing which requires that hud funds were used to maximize job and training opportunities for low income residents my organization the community service society has long been concerned about the scale ineffectiveness of local section three efforts by the new york city housing authority say more than one hundred sixty year old organization we were one of the first to address urban poverty in america we found of the columbia school of social work and for those visiting new york the first public baths there but our work recently is focused on labor force issues in new york particularly concerning black males and disconnected  place new york shakespeareans in context it should be noted that the new york city housing authority runs the largest and reputedly one of the best housing authorities in the nation it serves over one hundred eighty thousand households in three hundred forty development across the five boroughs of the city with a resident population in that complex of five hundred thousand its size comes close to matching some major cities in america and it represents i think somewhat over a quarter of the total population of residents of public housing in contrast to other areas of low income families are desperate to get into public housing in new york we have a waiting list that it well exceeds one hundred thousand and waits as long as nine years are not uncommon for people waiting to get in niger receives more than a billion dollars in hard which are spent on management operations and capital and this year has already received four hundred twenty three million additional in economic stimulus which opens up further opportunities in short a major economic engine within the city of new york and we have a good reason to expect section three efforts to be significant but we find it falls short of providing economic opportunity residence size comparable to the expenditure in our latest housing policy report that we've submitted to the committee making the connection economic opportunity for public housing residents we find that only fifty one percent of nine hundred thirty one thousand working age residents participated in the force another thirteen percent were engaged in school or training we estimate at present and this is probably a low estimate that between twenty and thirty thousand residents are on employed and now actively work in a recession retcon a me the worst since the great depression of the thirty's we have some reason to believe from our experts that unemployment rates for blacks and latinos in new york may well top out in black and latino men between eighteen and thirty four over a third don't have high school diplomas as our report indicates the authority section three effort is ridiculously small compared to the number of potential job seekers and  possible for residents to watch as normal investment goes on in their community and sit around and none of those jobs are available this becomes an intolerable situation it provides a private right of actual mat agree to take legal action against agencies or contractors new york as you may be aware has a long history of discriminatory behavior in the trades it sharpens the requirements for hiring and training for agencies and contractors  also faced some challenges the choice neighborhoods initiative has great promise as a new phase of poverty concentration but as best i can tell it also has the potential to repeat or overlook some of the shortcomings with the whole program along with collaborators at the university of chicago one of whom behind me today at my research is focused on at the ground level of the massive public housing transformation currently underway in chicago our research has included in depth interviews with almost two hundred residents and seventy five other stakeholders and almost three hundred observations of internal meetings and community activity i will make two main points this morning about what we are learning about mixing in development in chicago first we have identified some of the early benefits that residents of experience but also some important downsides to what is happening to them second successful mixing can development is more complicated than anticipated and i will propose success factors that should be considered what have been early resident experiences in mixed income development on the very positive side there have been high levels of residents satisfaction with the new physical environment public housing residents never thought they would get to live in such high quality housing monitoring in the new development generates stress and some of told us that they feel there are double standards that are applied to them versus the other residents of the development there's an increased sense of within the new development residents feel stereotyped by their new neighbors because of where they used to live there are low levels of social interaction among the residents some residents are disappointed with the lack of a sense of community others welcome the privacy in the new development but there is a considerable amount of self isolation withdrawing and really keeping to themselves and this was not the intention of they've also been some tension and negative interactions among residents driven by underlying us versus them dynamic these issues  absence of shared norms and concerns about social control let me use my remaining time to suggest six possible key factors for success number one balancing screening with inclusion which low income residents will get to return onsite to benefit from the revitalization the key will be how to screen out those residents who may create problems for everyone while screening in as many residents as possible who could make the most of the opportunity second property management it is clear that high quality property management is critical to a successful development but less obvious is the potential for a property manager either be a central player in the positive community building process or by imposing their own prejudices and differential treatment of residence third support services housing relocation alone will not change residence economic circumstances there need to be both pre and post occupancy and not just work supports an incentive but social services as well and these services must be sustained well beyond moving so thus there is a need for long term funding service infrastructure and service integration physical design units should be externally indistinguishable but also physically integrated on the site and the design should include common space  amenities this is needed to promote social relations but we must anticipate that it will be contested raising issues of norms of behavior of informal social  control resident engagement and community building given the extreme income and racial diversity in the site social connections will not happen naturally there must be ways to identify shared interests and common thousand and one to two thousand and five and the chicago family case management demonstration which began in two thousand and six of a bold effort to transform distressed public housing communities and demonstrate that housing programs could produce good results for their biggest problem is that they've lived in public housing for more than twenty years they will continue to support to ensure that they're able to maintain the gains they made in leaving distressed public housing including long term employment and financial literacy services  stable and avoid becoming homeless or ending up in nursing homes many of them still have children in the household to help to help those children from ending up in the child welfare system for example a strategy might be to convert some traditional  they are of course restricted by the availability of fair market rent willingness of landlords to accept housing choice they're also limited by their knowledge of the housing market and their own preferences for staying in neighborhoods that  so dollars for hope six project i don't care where the housing authority looks or the mayor look it's going to end up in the low income because that's the only affordable in developments happen on a property that belongs to the public housing authority that is subject to a declaration of trust and that has units that have annual contributions contracts on them that are going to be demolished so when the portion of grant and i don't recall that there is an acquisition portion that might be that they're adding on land around the property that they already own the first step and hope six is identifying what property the public housing authority has that it wants to deal with in terms of demolition this legislative intent to this day is to fold it is to to demolish public housing units that are obsolete because the vast majority of public housing stock is between fifty and seventy years old its purpose is to  dick onsen trade property property and it's purpose is to build something back using a bunch of different kinds of financial tools not just public housing fund the reason that it worked in kansas city the reason it has worked in other cities as well when it has worked and it's worked mostly is because the marriage of all those tools have come out with a product that serves a lot of people not just the demographic that is occupying the public housing bandwidth public housing is a financing mechanism that essentially is a unit financing mechanism to operate a particular apartment when you add the other mechanisms you're serving sensually low income people but you're you may not be serving low income people who had received a public housing unit dr boston illustrated this just a few minutes ago with respect to  how it is that folks come back or don't come back there's always attrition from public housing one of the reasons that things one of the reasons that it winds up being the case the public hope six deals as you noted look better is because generally the way that they are pro forma the way that their economic means by economically model allows for reserves to to permit the maintenance of those you know from an economic perspective of us and i don't know if i've missed the point you're making the point i was trying to make what we're talking about is trying to completely socially and in some cases even morally and is a very vital community and if you go to tacoma it's another example of a place where again it's in a vital community it depends on and this is where the local nature has to be brought into consideration it depends upon the rule of real estate location location location it depends upon where you're building it is a very different situation in kansas city perhaps than it is in seattle and i think that that's ranking member for b work that you've done in affordable housing especially with the affordable housing trust which i hope will in time help us with a good many of the problems that we are contending with currently i also thank you for the assemblage of witnesses that we have today all of whom have great credentials and i thank you for your testimony my first question and it's to contend why have a building that we have to manage why not just have a whole the most prominent answer to that would be that in some cities with very tight housing market housing choice vouchers are extremely difficult for towns to use they face tremendous competition in the rental market and given choices landlords tend to prefer residents who don't have and section eight certificates to those who do and so in some hot real estate markets that characterize many americans used to characterize many american cities housing choice vouchers are about as good as confederate  money moving to another question and thank you we have lost about fifty thousand public housing units because of the whole six revitalization program is that a fair statement if i've made an utilization rates that are bordering ninety eight percent and they tend to be very dense areas of the country the places where you probably struggle a bit are in places that have housing authorities in suburban areas where housing authorities in rural areas rural areas drive a lot of underutilization the second largest housing authority in this country is not on the mainland it's in puerto rico it has more units doctor i'll give you a chance to respond in a moment if i have enough time but because we don't have one for one replacement and because we have persons who do not return but there is an sundry reason i have to ask is hope six being used to picked people from projects that ordinarily might not be victims i heard what were called forcible entry and detain  in another life commonly known as addiction and there were persons that could not be picked it but my suspicion is if they had a chance to find another way to move person this may have been done so is that a part does that happen when you when you rebuild reconstruct do you lose people who are who have been deemed undesirable but who were lawfully eligible to be in the project the housing public housing in this country at risk because of documented workers because there is a big concern about the takeover about the documented workers just absolutely consuming the public housing stock of this country and i'm eager to know where this is response i think it's also important to note though that what dr boston is finding may also be evidence of different populations going into different circumstances so the group that we see going into mixed income housing and having better numbers in terms of achievement may have been actually a higher achieving group in some way had the ability to jump through the different hurdles they needed to to get themselves into the new housing versus taking are making different choices so part of what research to do moving forward  have worked with the housing authority very closely over the last ten years in cincinnati and with all due respect to dr boston and his comments about the way the system is working we haven't seen it play out that way in cincinnati and i'd displaced many low income families but in addition to the home project there were other very large developments that were also torn down around the same time which led to a dramatic increase in the voucher population but where the location where the relocation occurred in many cases was driven not by the housing authority or the policies of the housing authority directly but by what they were claiming to be the private sector well when we dug into it a little deeper what we found was that the reimbursement rates in certain neighborhoods and they tended to be high poverty neighborhoods  happened in addition these were the same neighborhoods that were impacted by predatory lending and who have felt the brunt of the foreclosure crisis so at the same time these find rental opportunities to the low income neighborhoods they've taken the money and this aggregated broken down into different prowse depending upon the cost of housing in different neighborhoods the challenge we face is that those those run rate skin can change dramatically from street to street in certain neighborhoods so when we tried to set rental rates by census tract even they can be what their community looks like it's the housing authority they know what rents should be that is an issue of some controversy before this body it has been for a very long time i certainly am i am certainly an advocate of that decision being made locally as humanly possible within some parameter but the second issue here is one of the housing authority recognising what it's looking at in terms of what is housing what is housing stock looks like cincinnati housing stock is very different than atlanta is atlanta has an enormous number of family options and also a single family detached where cincinnati has far more single family detached that's a supply driver and that has to do with a more of a broader policy issue that's tougher to address certainly on the on the payment standard issue there are options that the housing authority has within a degree but there is a question in their policy question of who e and i'll wrap up but i really do think that the objective obviously through the ballot or program is to allow families allow kids to grow up in neighborhoods that create a supportive environment but that is not the way we've seen it play out at least in cincinnati what what we're seeing is a re concentration of poverty you know the same type of concentration we're trying to break down through the hope six project but that's not how it's working in practice and i believe that for the most part is due to the restrictions i'm better placed on local housing authority by hud and i would like to see far greater flexibility you only have to open up the newspaper evidence indicating repayment plan and no past balances within three months of application what does that have to do with whether a potential and which is units that are being or work finance in terms of their construction by a low income housing tax credit when they're financed by low income housing tax credits a means an investor was involved and that questionnaire is very very common in the two awful lot and ask those questions just like the way you've asked the most tenants are now ask those questions because when you're an investor the critical issue is can the tenant pay rent in order to support the units that they have invested in if there is evidence that the  tenant cannot that is troublesome they have because they are the landlord and they have to pay usually a lender they have to pay an investor they have to pay whatever they have to have to find out whether that's a religion or what percentage of public housing tenants for nonpayment of rent public housing tenants i don't know it depends upon what the public housing authorities policy is on rent setting ever funded a unit of of affordable housing all of those things together together with local money and state money and a variety of pots are put together together with private money to fund a unit when we talk about hope forgotten about us they never forgot about federal government they always said thank you and they always we were always a big piece of the pie but it should be the case that those grand openings are participatory and that they