Overview
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Choice Neighborhood program supports locally driven strategies to create a comprehensive approach to transforming struggling neighborhoods with distressed public housing.
Choice Neighborhoods is focused on three core goals (from the HUD website):
- Housing: Replace distressed public and assisted housing with high-quality mixed-income housing that is well-managed and responsive to the needs of the surrounding neighborhood;
- People: Improve educational outcomes and intergenerational mobility for youth with services and supports delivered directly to youth and their families; and
- Neighborhood: Create the conditions necessary for public and private reinvestment in distressed neighborhoods to offer the kinds of amenities and assets, including safety, good schools, and commercial activity, that are important to families’ choices about their community.
In December, 2016 HUD awarded a $30 million Choice grant to Boston Housing Authority and the City of Boston. This grant will support the revitalization of Roxbury’s Whittier Street housing development and the surrounding neighborhood.