Urban revitalization efforts touch many aspects of daily life for residents, with the ultimate goal of making the community a better place to live for all. While schools are not typically impacted directly by neighborhood renewal work, a group of researchers look at the student-level impacts of a federal program that does specifically cite school improvement as part of its revitalization model. Their new report finds only a weak connection between the program’s stated education-related goals and observed academic outcomes for students.
The Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) is a program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) started in 2009. It “aims to decrease neighborhood racial/ethnic segregation and concentrated poverty by developing mixed-income housing units and attracting economically diverse residents.” Additionally, “high-performing schools are an explicitly stated goal of the CNI.” This analysis looks at one CNI project in Memphis, Tennessee. It is called “South City” today (and throughout the report), but this was primarily a “branding” identifier applied to a previously-unnamed section of downtown beginning in 2016 as the CNI revitalization got underway in earnest. A nearly $30 million grant was specifically aimed at demolishing one 1940s-era low-income housing project and providing 712 new housing units it its wake—600 on the original site and 112 in the surrounding blocks. The report’s authors go into lengthy detail about all of HUD’s goals and intentions for bettering neighborhoods and residents’ lives, but the mechanisms by which schools are/were supposed to be improved remain unclear even after the analysis is complete.
The report explains the CNI intervention generally as improving physical infrastructure in the neighborhood—specifically, the renovation and replacement of housing—and forging “new partnerships across community organizations, local businesses, and schools, from early childhood to and through college.” More specifically, the researchers look at students whose families received what are termed “case management” and support services. They denote a vague but wide range of services including “asset building, basic and emergency services, adult education, employment services, health and family services, early childhood services, youth services, legal services,” and more. Such services were promised to all original CNI resident families (and provided from an office in the local district high school) for up to 5 years after redevelopment. Demolition began in 2017. Construction was completed in six phases between early 2019 and October 2025.
The researchers focus on 59,277 children who lived within the South City footprint and whose student-level data were available from the 2015–16 through the 2021–22 school years. The two treatment groups consisted of nearly 3,000 students who attended one of the four Memphis-Shelby County School district buildings in that footprint and a second group of 621 students who also received “case management services” via CNI. Student outcome measures analyzed were attendance, disciplinary rates, and academic performance (first via NWEA MAP scores—later by the i-Ready Diagnostic scores when the district switched tests—in reading and math).
The researchers applied a robust difference-in-difference analysis to dynamically estimate CNI impacts on students. Attending a CNI partner school decreased suspension days by 41 percent compared to non-CNI students and reduced absences by 6 percent—the latter almost fully accruing to male students only. The only other statistically-significant overall effect of attending a CNI school was a small decrease in math performance—roughly 0.06 standard deviations. Meanwhile, students receiving CNI case management services showed no overall impacts one way or another, although a marginal increase in reading test performance—0.12 standard deviations and still significant—was observed in a small subset of students with a history of family economic distress. Some significant positive effects emerged in year one of both types of interventions, only to be lost by the end of year two.
Despite what sounds like tepid results, the report nonetheless concludes that place-based investments in revitalization can be effective in boosting students’ academic outcomes. This would be more plausible if the researchers could have connected one or two mechanisms to the findings observed, but there are just too many vague variables here to do so. As valuable as any individual service may be to neighborhood residents, the list is too broad and too opaque for a researcher to understand how their combination could result in both a dramatic reduction in suspensions and a decrease in math scores, for just one example.
Interestingly, an image in the report that lists some concrete services does a better job of explaining the educational interventions than the text of the report itself. The closer researchers can get to determining how much of these kinds of supports were provided and to which students in CNI cities, the more likely they will be to find models of change than can truly be called effective.
SOURCE: Jason Jabbari et al., “Can Neighborhood Redevelopment Initiatives Improve Educational Outcomes? Novel Evidence From the Choice Neighborhood Initiative,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (March 2026).
