The Race to Displace: The Long-Run Causal Effect of the 1996 Olympic Legacy Program on Residential Locations in Atlanta, GA

Abstract

In this paper, I estimate the long-run causal effect of the Olympic Legacy Program, an initiative staged by the city of Atlanta to use public and private funding to demolish and revitalize several public housing projects in the lead up to the 1996 Olympics. This initiative marked the first mixed-finance public housing development created under HOPE VI, a federal program launched in 1992 to redevelop the worst public housing projects in the United States. Residents of the demolished public housing units were guaranteed Section 8 Housing Vouchers to relocate. Using a unique longitudinal dataset from Infutor, I follow the residential locations of these households from 1985-2005. My research design compares a treatment group of individuals living in housing projects demolished leading up to the 1996 Olympics to a control group living in unaffected housing projects. I find that 10 years after the demolitions began, individuals in the treatment group on average live 6 miles further from their 1990 address and in neighborhoods that have poverty rates that are 6 percentage points lower, both relative to the control group. However, most of these individuals continue to live in high-poverty neighborhoods, suggesting that the provision of Section 8 Housing Vouchers is not enough to encourage households to "move to opportunity." I compare my estimates with those from prior work on public housing demolitions in Chicago and the landmark Moving to Opportunity Experiment. I discuss how these results support two distinct sets of existing literature: (1) research on the effects of place-based policies on incumbent residents and (2) research on the impact of mega-events on residents of host cities.