A recent report released by the Urban Institute finds that housing is necessary for families and individuals to achieve upward mobility. The authors urge communities, practitioners, and policymakers to broaden housing policy considerations to include a person’s power, autonomy, and value in their community which are essential to upward mobility. To incorporate these essential components of upward mobility, the report identifies five key housing goals: housing quality, housing affordability, housing stability, housing that builds assets and wealth, and neighborhood.
“Together, this ‘bundle’ of housing goals interacts in a variety of ways to significantly affect a household’s chance of upward mobility, though whether an outcome helps or hurts those chances may not be clear by examining one outcome in isolation,” writes the report’s authors. “Families sometimes have to make trade-offs between goals, for example, finding stable housing at the expense of living in a low-resourced neighborhood. Programs that support one housing goal may have mixed or negative effects on another. Understanding the magnitude and direction of these interactions could significantly help households, practitioners, and policymakers focus on the tradeoffs that are likely to yield the greatest long-term mobility benefits.”
Read the report here.
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