Residents in areas with lower home values perceived worse access to education, according to a new Zillow Aspirations Report that surveyed 10,000 Americans across 20 large metro areas. The largest gap was between areas with median home values in the lowest one-third and those with median home values in the highest one-third. Less than 40 percent of individuals in bottom-tier areas said they had relatively good access to high-quality education in their neighborhood, compared to 70 percent in the top tier.
This perception bears out. A study of HUD’s Moving to Opportunity program shows that living in mixed-income neighborhoods helps children in lower-income families achieve better school performance, higher college attendance rates and higher earnings than their counterparts in low-income communities. These outcomes were strongest among children who moved out of high-poverty areas before age 13.
Findings such as these spurred one of our Agency partners, Habitat for Humanity of Catawba Valley, and the City of Hickory, NC, to develop the award-winning Northstone neighborhood, Catawba County’s first mixed-income community, to foster social mobility among its youngest residents. The community received financing from the Self-Help Loan Pool, which along with the Community Partners Loan Pool and the NC Home Advantage suite of mortgage products help home buyers statewide access higher-value neighborhoods.
For more information on how housing drives success in North Carolina, visit 2018.HousingBuildNC.com.
