Will the next generation be better off than this one? 

According to Raj Chetty, Harvard economist and Director of Opportunity Insights, “what really seems to matter is childhood environment rather than where you live as an adult.” 

Armed with this knowledge, Chetty says local decision-makers can implement policies to increase economic mobility for children in their communities by creating spaces where they can flourish.  

“More mixed-income communities, so less segregated places, tend to give poor kids better chances of raising their income,” he said during a forum for Utah leaders at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute on March 27. 

Other impactful community factors Chetty identified include more stable family structures, better K-12 schools and high levels of social capital, which he defines as relationships between people in different income brackets. Because of this, he said helping lower-income families move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods can make a meaningful difference for some children, however, it’s crucial to work on more scalable solutions. 

One option Chetty’s team analyzed is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI Neighborhood Revitalization Program. Through this project, the Federal government worked with private partners to transform more than 250 high-poverty public housing projects into revitalized, mixed-income communities. Chetty noted that while concerns about displacement made the project controversial at the time, his team’s analysis showed that children who grew up in the revitalized communities earn about $4,000 more per year than children who lived there 10 years before the project. 

“This is a pretty expensive investment upfront,” Chetty said. “But you add up these earning gains generation after generation for years for all those children and this is an investment that is enormously profitable for taxpayers and society.”

Physical desegregation is key to creating higher-opportunity communities, but Chetty said it’s also important to address friending bias, which accounts for about half of the lack of connections between high- and low-income people. At Berkeley Public High School in California, Chetty said things appear desegregated on the surface. However, there are friending-bias issues school officials are trying to address by placing students into pods in 9th grade with activities that bring kids together across different backgrounds. 

”Is this gonna make a difference or not? I don’t know,” Chetty said. “But these kinds of things are worth thinking about going forward as well.”

As demonstrated in his research, Chetty said Utah has some of the best social mobility in the United States. But as the state’s demographics change, it will take deliberate efforts to preserve this. 

“ I very much hope all of you will be able to come together to continue to maintain Utah as a place devoted to economic opportunity for everyone,” he said.