Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In 2007, San Francisco launched HOPE SF, an ambitious effort to redevelop four of its public housing sites into mixed-income housing. Unlike previous efforts to redevelop public housing that have tended to focus on the physical transformation of the site, the city has made a conscious choice to tackle individual-level poverty and has provided intensive employment and social services to residents as part of the HOPE SF initiative. One of the goals is to improve wages by connecting adults to the city’s strong labor market. This is an ambitious goal: in 2011, two-thirds of the HOPE SF population lived below the poverty level, and unemployment rates among able-bodied adults hovered around 70 percent.

This study seeks to assess whether the early HOPE SF investments are having an impact on economic mobility for working age adults living in public housing. While Chetty and colleagues have presented new evidence that mobility strategies can help to increase the earnings of public housing residents, there is less research on the impacts of mixed-income public housing redevelopment on economic mobility. This paper specifically tests whether there has been an increase in employment rates and/or wages for adults at the HOPE SF sites, and whether those gains can be attributed to HOPE SF. The paper uses an administrative dataset that merges San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA) data on all public housing residents in the city (n=4,300) with yearly panel data on employment, wage, and income information from the city’s Human Services Agency and the California Economic Development Department between 2011 and 2017. These data allow me to test employment and wage outcomes for residents living at HOPE SF sites in comparison to other public housing residents in San Francisco.

Using these data, I present two levels of analysis. First, I present descriptive trends for residents within the four HOPE SF sites to assess whether there are differences in a) program uptake, b) employment rates, or c) changes in income or wages across HOPE SF sites. I seek to systematically answer questions such as: Are there racial or other demographic differences in who is participating in employment services and/or seeing changes in employment or wages? Does the intensity of program participation and/or housing redevelopment stage influence either employment rates or wages? Second, using propensity score matching, I assess whether there are significant differences in employment rates and/or wages between residents living in HOPE SF developments and those living in other public housing sites not receiving the place-based “treatment.” Early results suggest significant wage gains for public housing residents who do participate in HOPE SF programs, but that participation varies significantly by age, household composition, race/ethnicity, and stage of housing redevelopment.

This study makes an important contribution to our understanding of whether government policies focused on re-investing in poor, urban neighborhoods have improved economic outcomes for their residents, while at the same time pointing to areas for improvement in mixed-income redevelopment implementation and program design.