The American Dream means different things to different people, but at its core is a simple idea: that children’s chances of success should not be determined entirely by the circumstances of their birth. Recent research from Opportunity Insights, a nonpartisan think tank based at Harvard University, shows that access to opportunity varies dramatically across neighborhoods and populations in the United States.
The Kenan Institute’s Conference on Market-Based Solutions for Reducing Wealth Inequality, to take place June 4, will explore unequal access to opportunity and its effects on American communities. Gregory Bruich, Harvard economist and research principal at Opportunity Insights, will present evidence on which places in America provide the strongest pathways for children from low-income families to improve their socioeconomic status. In this Q&A, Bruich discusses insights from research at Opportunity Insights and the potential for neighborhood-level programs to support economic mobility.
Opportunity Insights has developed the Opportunity Atlas, which visualizes the many dynamics impacting economic mobility at various scales, from households and neighborhoods to cities and regions. What are the most salient trends that the atlas brings to the fore?
Gregory Bruich: I would say the most striking lesson from the Opportunity Atlas is just how much children’s chances of rising up vary from place to place, even for kids growing up in families at exactly the same income level. There are places in America where children from low-income families go on to do quite well in adulthood, and other places where those same children, starting from the same point in the income distribution, have much worse outcomes. From a scientific point of view, that basic fact is enormously important because it tells us that opportunity is not distributed evenly across geographies.
A second salient pattern is that these differences emerge at a very local level. When people first see the national maps, they naturally focus on broad regional differences. But once you zoom in, you see that mobility can vary tremendously across neighborhoods within the same city. That is one of the key contributions of the atlas: It lets us move beyond general statements about “the South” or “big cities” and instead identify very specific local environments where children are more or less likely to thrive.
A third lesson is that the geography of opportunity is tightly connected to the geography of social capital. One of the strongest patterns in the data is that places with greater economic connectedness — places where low-income children are more likely to interact with and form friendships across class lines — tend to have much higher rates of upward mobility. That does not mean social capital is the whole story, but it does suggest that who you know, and whether institutions create genuine cross-class interaction, matters a great deal.
Employing a geographic focus to wealth and opportunity disparities, Opportunity Insights has researched what is needed to create “high-opportunity neighborhoods.” What are the advantages and challenges of working on socioeconomic mobility issues at the neighborhood level?
Gregory Bruich: I think the main advantage of working at the neighborhood level is that it gets us much closer to the mechanisms that actually shape children’s lives. “City” is often too broad a unit. Children do not experience a city in the abstract; they experience a very concrete local environment made up of schools, peers, housing conditions, public space, safety and access to institutions. If we want to understand why mobility differs, and more importantly what we can do about it, neighborhood-level analysis is often the right level of resolution.
A second advantage is that neighborhood-focused work is more actionable. Once you can identify high-opportunity neighborhoods, you can think much more concretely about policy. You can ask whether families can realistically access those places through housing vouchers. You can ask what specific barriers prevent that access. And you can ask whether it is more effective to help families move to opportunity or to bring opportunity to where families currently live. That is a much more useful policy conversation than a generic debate about poverty.
A challenge is that high-opportunity neighborhoods are often hard to access, not so much because of price but because of search frictions, lack of information and the sheer scarcity of time and resources that many low-income families face. One of the important lessons from research at Opportunity Insights is that relatively modest barriers in the housing search process can have very large effects on where families end up. So identifying high-opportunity neighborhoods is only part of the work; the next question is whether families can actually get into them.
And then there is the deeper policy challenge: If we focus only on helping some families move, we risk leaving behind the neighborhoods that currently have low levels of opportunity. So in practice, I think the right approach is not to choose between mobility strategies and place-based investment but to view them as complements. Some families should have real access to neighborhoods that already generate better outcomes, while we also work to improve the neighborhoods where many families currently live.
What policies and programs have your research found to be most effective in increasing economic mobility?
Gregory Bruich: I would say there are two broad classes of policies that look especially promising.
The first are housing mobility policies that help families with young children move to higher-opportunity areas. One of the key lessons from that research is that neighborhoods do appear to have causal effects on children’s long-run outcomes, and those effects are larger the earlier in childhood a child is exposed and the longer that exposure lasts. That is a very important result because it means place is not just correlated with children’s outcomes; it can help change them.
What is especially encouraging is that the more recent work suggests we do not necessarily need massive new programs to change outcomes. In a randomized experiment conducted by Opportunity Insights in Seattle, customized supports provided by a housing navigator substantially increased the share of voucher families who moved to high-opportunity neighborhoods.
The second broad class of policies are place-based investments that genuinely improve children’s environments where they are. There are several promising examples. Recent work at Opportunity Insights on a program called HOPE VI suggests that revitalizing distressed public housing can improve long-run outcomes for children, particularly when those changes increase exposure to stronger surrounding environments and greater social interaction.
The broader theme in this research is that if we want to increase mobility, we should focus on interventions that expand access to better neighborhoods and create more cross-class interaction during childhood.
Would you speak to how you view the responsibilities of public, private and academic entities when it comes to upward mobility?
Gregory Bruich: I think each of those sectors play complementary roles in promoting upward mobility.
Government is uniquely able to operate at scale and invest with a long time horizon. Many policies that improve children’s outcomes may generate large social returns, but only years later, and government is often the only actor that can wait for those returns.
The private sector can also contribute, particularly through human capital investment. Firms have an incentive to develop a more productive workforce, and one way they do so is through training, apprenticeships and workforce development programs that help workers build skills valued in the labor market.
Academics have a responsibility to test competing explanations, distinguish causation from correlation, and communicate findings clearly enough to improve policy. In my view, the best outcomes come when those three sectors work in partnership rather than in isolation.
