The Choice Neighborhoods program leverages significant public and private dollars to support locally driven strategies that address struggling neighborhoods with distressed public or HUD-assisted housing through a comprehensive approach to neighborhood transformation. Local leaders, residents, and stakeholders, such as public housing authorities, cities, schools, police, business owners, nonprofits, and private developers, come together to create and implement a plan that revitalizes distressed HUD housing and addresses the challenges in the surrounding neighborhood. The program helps communities transform neighborhoods by revitalizing severely distressed public and/or assisted housing and catalyzing critical improvements in the neighborhood, including vacant property, housing, businesses, services and schools.

To this end, Choice Neighborhoods is focused on three core goals:
1. 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;
2. People: Improve outcomes of households living in the target housing related to employment and income, health, and children’s education; and
3. 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.

The Lead Applicant must be a Public Housing Agency (PHA), a local government, or a tribal entity. If there is a Co-Applicant, it must be a PHA, a local government, a tribal entity, or the owner of the target HUD-assisted housing. The local government of jurisdiction, or tribe for applications that target Indian Housing, must be the Lead Applicant or Co-Applicant.

Eligible neighborhoods are those with:
– A minimum of 20% of residents estimated to be in poverty or have extremely low incomes; and
– Experiencing high crime and/or high vacancy.