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Does Urban Public Housing Contribute to the Social Isolation of Its Tenants?

David A. Reingold and Kathy Dehm

This paper investigates the impact of urban public housing on the social isolation of its tenants.  It estimates the effect of public housing and neighborhood poverty on labor foirce activity, civic participation, and the structure and characteristics of social networks, using cross-sectional survey data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality.  The basic strategy of analysis it to compare urban public housing residents with their counterparts in the private real-estate market, controlling for individual - and neighborhood-level differeces, and testing the impact of urban public housing located in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated poverty does not substantially contribute to the social isolation of its tenants.  The implications of these findings suggest that urban public housing policy needs to be less focused on moving tenats into the private real-estate market and poverty de-concentration, and more focused on human capital strategies designed to foster social mobility.

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