This report is the final in a series on MDRC’s evaluation of the Seattle site of the Jobs-Plus Community Revitalization Initiative for Public Housing Families (Jobs-Plus), a national demonstration project testing a new employment program for public housing residents. Based in the city’s Rainier Vista housing development, Seattle Jobs-Plus was distinctive because it came to operate the community and supportive services component of the housing authority’s HOPE VI initiative to tear down and rebuild the development as a mixed-income neighborhood. Rainier Vista was also the most ethnically diverse of the six housing developments operating Jobs-Plus. Its tenant population, which included many East African and Southeast Asian immigrants, spoke no fewer than 22 languages.
Jobs-Plus combines on-site employment-related services, new rent rules to allow residents to keep more of their earnings, and a neighbor-to-neighbor outreach strategy to share information about employment opportunities. The program is targeted toward all of a housing development’s working-age, non-disabled residents.
Although selected as a Jobs-Plus site in 1997, Seattle’s receipt of a HOPE VI grant two years later introduced a unique and potentially confounding feature to that site’s program. Because Seattle Jobs-Plus continued to operate in a modified form, MDRC continued evaluating it but with a scaled-back research design. This report describes the program’s effects on residents’ employment and earnings.
Read more from this post.
