Improving Access to Housing Amid Exclusionary Housing Markets: A Latin American Viewpoint of the Moving to Work Demonstration

Adriana Hurtado-Tarazona
Cider, Universidad de los Andes

Undertaking a retrospective look at the Moving to Work (MTW) demonstration—a diverse and ambitious policy demonstration, applied by different agencies and in diverse sociospatial and socioeconomic contexts—is a valuable effort for the analysis and improvement of public policies. In this sense, the articles in this symposium are immensely informative. Although the initiatives included in MTW are complex, and sometimes difficult to understand from an international perspective, the articles of this collection help not only to understand the U.S. initiative, but also to open an opportunity for knowledge transfer. Within the symposium, the essay on the Rent Reform Demonstration (Riccio, this volume) is especially enlightening because decisionmaking processes in public policy are crucial for understanding and replicating interventions, and this information is seldom published. Getting to know the discarded alternatives, and the reasons for doing so, opens an opportunity to analyze policy decisions based on the particular contexts and conditions for implementations, instead of what is more common: to state “best practices” or recipes for success that end up being replicated in disparate contexts (Angotti and Irazábal, 2017).