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September 25, 2025

The Golden Age of Public Housing—and Why It Didn’t Last

If Americans have any shared image of public housing, it is one of dilapidated and even dangerous “projects” and locations of concentrated poverty. But there was a time—a brief shining…

September 24, 2025

Subsidized Housing and Upward Mobility

In 1983, Harvard scholars Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood sought to determine the length of time participants in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) spent in the program….

September 8, 2025

A Hidden Explanation for the Wealth Gap on Racial Lines That Emerges in the Push to Promote Public Housing

We hear a great deal about what’s called the black-white wealth gap.  It’s not an inaccurate phrase. According to the latest data from the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the…

April 19, 2024

The New Deal’s Failed Kibbutz in the Desert

At the height of the New Deal, with the Social Security Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Civilian Conservation Corps already enacted, the Roosevelt Administration’s Farm Security Administration…

November 13, 2023

How The IRS Discourages Boomer Charity

Americans like to call ourselves the most generous nation on earth — but charitable giving is on the decline. In 2022, it fell 3.4% (10.5% when adjusted for inflation) to fall…

October 12, 2023

Blue States Are Getting More Federal Money Than They Should

The late New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan long complained — and commissioned data — about New York’s status as a “donor state,” for sending more in tax dollars to Washington…

October 12, 2023

Blue-State Benefits: How Federal Grants Fail to Consider Population Shift

Abstract The federal government annually awards hundreds of billions of dollars in grants to states. In this report, I examine funding for the largest federal grant programs for 2020–22, focusing…

July 25, 2023

Not Just Tulsa

Earlier this month, an Oklahoma judge ruled that the City of Tulsa cannot be held legally or financially responsible for the actions of the violent mob that burned down the city’s Greenwood…