This post was originally published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Since its inception in 2010, the Choice Neighborhoods program (Choice) has provided $1.8 billion in grants to rebuild severely distressed public or HUD-assisted housing and to revitalize the surrounding neighborhoods. Choice uses a comprehensive community development approach that aims for improvement across three domains—housing, people, and neighborhood. The report examines what the first five Choice grantees (funded in FY 2010-11) and four additional grantees (funded in FY 2013) achieved. The report relies on administrative data from HUD, secondary data (Census, HMDA, Zillow, USPS, and more), interviews with program stakeholders, and a survey of residents. A novel quasi-experimental approach, called the synthetic control method (SCM), is used to estimate the impacts of Choice Neighborhood funding on neighborhood conditions. The study was undertaken to answer fundamental, evaluative questions about the impacts of the placed based investments delivered through the Choice Neighborhoods program. The analysis focuses in detail on a set of early grantees whose grants are, for the most part, completed. Generally, the study found that grantees succeeded in redeveloping severely distressed public and assisted housing while adhering to a one-for-one replacement requirement and developed mixed-income housing. The study also found residents of some Choice Neighborhoods developments experienced reductions in neighborhood poverty and significant increases in employment and income, while other findings for residents were mixed. Grantees undertook a variety of critical community improvements in the neighborhood, though broader neighborhood impacts could not, with certainty, be attributed solely to Choice Neighborhoods.