Effects from Living in Mixed-Income Communities for Low-Income Families: A Review of the Literature

Effects from Living in Mixed-Income Communities for Low-Income Families A Review of the Literature Diane K. Levy Zach McDade Kassie Dumlao With support from The Annie E. Casey Foundation November 2010 Table of Contents I Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 II Definitions and Components of Mixed-income Housing ....................................... 3 Scale and Intent ............................................................................................................ 3 Income, Tenure and Design ......................................................................................... 4 Sustainability ............................................................................................................... 6 III Hypothesized Benefits of Mixed-income Environments ........................................ 8 IV Mixed-income Communities and Housing Developments ................................... 11 V Prevalence and Sustainability of Mixed-Income .................................................. 23 VI Future Research ....................................................................................................... 25 References Cited ............................................................................................................. 30 I Introduction There long has been interest among policymakers and researchers in the potential of mixed-income communities as an approach to address a number of problems associated with concentrated poverty and neighborhood disinvestment. The goals or purposes claimed for mixed-income housing strategies can be categorized as poverty alleviation (benefiting low-income families), desegregation (affecting both disadvantaged and advantaged neighborhoods which may or may not lead to a number of benefits or challenges to residents), and urban revitalization (bringing investment to disinvested neighborhoods) (Brower 2009; Duke 2009; Joseph 2006; Joseph and Chaskin 2010; Joseph et al. 2007; Kleit 2005). Though often thought of in terms of the redevelopment of public housing developments through the federal HOPE VI program and similar local efforts, mixed-income strategies can be understood more broadly to include efforts to relocate poor households to relatively higher income neighborhoods, such as through the Gautreaux program in the greater Chicago area and through the use of Housing Choice Vouchers. In addition to these intentional efforts to create mixed-income developments and neighborhoods, mixed-income communities can be thought to include those that occur organically through shifts in a neighborhood‘s resident base. The Casey Foundation1 and other members of the philanthropic community are interested in surveying the field of knowledge regarding mixed-income housing, defined broadly, and benefits associated with it for low-income families. This annotated literature review addresses the following major questions: How is mixed-income defined? What are the theorized benefits thought to accrue to lower-income families from living in mixed-income housing? What benefits have been identified for children and adults from mixed-income housing? How prevalent and sustainable are mixed-income developments and neighborhoods? The final section of this report identifies gaps in what is known about mixed-income communities that foundations might consider addressing through the support of future research. In preparing this review of the literature, we began by identifying relevant articles included in existing bibliographies prepared by UI staff and a project advisor and by searching for articles via the Google Scholar search engine. We restricted the search to published articles that discussed theories of the impact of living in mixed-income housing on low-income families or presented results from empirical work that examined impact. 1 This project was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The authors would like to thank Dr. Charles Rutheiser at The Casey Foundation for supporting this effort and for his helpful comments along the way. Dr. Mark Joseph of Case Western Reserve University graciously shared his extensive bibliography on mixed-income communities. Dr. Claudia Coulton, also with Case Western Reserve University, offered valuable suggestions for the study as did Tom Kingsley of the Urban Institute who provided excellent comments on the draft report as well. 2 Although we do include some research on mixed-race housing to the extent that an article addressed both mixed-race and income, we did not set out to cover the body of work focused on mixed-race housing per se. We did not collect technical reports on mixed-income communities, relevant Masters Theses or doctoral dissertations, all of which would be valuable to review but would have required additional resources to ide