New Orleans   A new study being prominently reported argues powerfully that the neighborhood where you live and are raised may have way more to say about determining your future than many families or policy makers or government officials may have been willing to admit. That’s scary for many considering the abandonment of much of urban policy and investment by the federal and other branches of government in recent, and likely coming years, unless there is a major, almost revolutionary shift. Implicit, but unstated, in the dry report melting economics and math together, is how important strong community organizations, like the ones build by ACORN in lower income neighborhoods, could have had the ability to dislodge the depressing path of the future.

Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, reported on this harder look at the numbers in The New York Times, reviewing a dissertation being completed by one of his students, Eric Chyn, that is finding that the impact of neighborhood, always understood to be powerful, is even more devastatingly so than earlier assumed. Previous studies have found that children relocated from more difficult environments at a young age outperformed their peers economically by a substantial amount. These studies looked at winners and losers of a lottery in a public housing project, comparing the winners, those who were given a housing voucher to move out, with the losers, who those who were trapped inside. Chyn found that the impact was understated, because everyone entering the lottery was motivated to win, so that the real difference was between those who wanted out, and those who were stuck there. He looked at a more random set of people moved in and out as public housing buildings were dismantled in Chicago and the figures jumped out like screaming demons in an everyday Halloween.

The lack of a serious national housing policy that allows families better odds of emerging in the future is ignored by the right with their pretense of personal responsibility and not pursued as a mission on the order of the search for the Holy Grail on the left. It’s not a two-handed problem, where on the one hand this, and the other hand that. Unless we dramatically improve living conditions – and – opportunity in low-and-moderate income neighborhoods and force economic and racial mobility in communities, health opportunities, educational offerings, and job prospects, then the only thing we seem to be doing is making careers for economics to calculate the level of our failure.

And, part of the equation has to be support, one way or another, of vibrant and aggressive community organizations, and developing the organizers who build them, so that the ways and means to carry on the fight and have people participate in the push will be in place, as well as the ability to hold government and institutions accountable for making the changes that can redirect dismal futures to ones with hope and promise.