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watch the children of those who do.
It’s impossible to know what effect a housing policy that
favors mixed-income communities will have over the next
few decades, but the first results are encouraging. Mixed-income properties can revitalize blighted neighborhoods,
Blanton said. Welch Plaza was the first new private construction in its section of Seattle in years, despite overlooking downtown and Elliot Bay.
More importantly, mixed-income communities can
revitalize the lives of those who live there. Sue Popkin,
a housing expert at the Urban Institute in Washington,
D.C., studies public housing, and she has found the HOPE
VI largely beneficial to those who used it.
“We were all surprised at how positive the findings were,”
she said in an Urban Institute Web site interview in 2004.
“The neighborhoods where people now live are dramati-
cally better than where they started. They are much safer.”
Hite has seen it firsthand, and that’s what makes her job
so rewarding. She has seen a young
woman who moved in 18 months
ago go from being barely able to care
for her apartment and children to
a responsible member of the com-
munity. She’s watched refugees from
bad relationships blossom in their
new home. Children who grew up in
the neighborhood now have gradu-
ated from high school, and some have
gone to college. It’s nice, she said, to
see them do so much with their lives.
