The central theme of the article “Lost in Transition” is that public housing policy is dominated by a misplaced emphasis on mixed-income revitalization of traditional housing developments. Furthermore, under the influence of neoliberal scholarship and policy, an incorrect assumption has been formulated that the private market can best deliver housing services to low-income families. The authors note that such policies are an outgrowth of superimposing neoliberal ideology on the sociological theory of contagion—more commonly referred to as “neighborhood effects.” Moreover, the correct policy for dealing with concentrated poverty is to demolish conventional public housing and create mixed-income revitalized developments in its place. Housing choice vouchers, they argue, should be given to families as a way of further deconcentrating poverty. In contrast, the authors of “Lost in Transition” conclude that families displaced by mixed-income revitalization and those receiving vouchers have relocated to neighborhoods not dissimilar to their origin communities. At the same time, they believe one of the biggest failures of the policy is that so few families have moved back into the fully constructed mixed-income communities.

Some aspects of the authors’ conclusions seem correct, and others do not. This observation is based on the extensive empirical investigations of the impact on families of the demolition and transformation of public housing into mixed-income developments. The studies have focused on Atlanta, Chicago, and New Haven. In the three places, longitudinal data were constructed to follow all families that received housing assistance over a 10-year period. Numerous focus group interviews of heads of households supplemented the empirical research. In full disclosure, the two largest empirical studies here were funded by grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, several evaluations of the Moving to Work Program in Atlanta and one in New Haven were conducted as a private consultant to the housing agencies.