But housing integration has downsides, some experts say. Building new affordable housing in wealthy areas takes investment away from the downtrodden areas that most need it. Moving poor children to better schools can help those individual students, but does nothing to improve the sub-par schools they left behind. (For more on this, listen to the recent work by This American Life on school desegregation.) And putting poor families in the suburbs, away from bus stops, food pantries, and other services, can make their lives harder, not easier. According to Mark Rogers, a community developer in East Austin and the executive director of the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation, sometimes low-income people want to live in the areas where they’ve lived their whole lives, where their parents lived, where their grandparents lived.

“You could take a paternalistic attitude and say, ‘You shouldn’t live over there, we’re not going to build housing for you over there,’” he said. And that hasn’t always been the approach, he added. “Traditionally, affordable-housing programs were able to transform communities by investing in better, safer housing.”

If America decides to take on its growing slum problem, people will need to think hard about how to do so. Mobility programs are proven to work for the families who move, but what happens to the neighborhoods that people leave? Can affordable-housing projects in low-income areas also help poor families succeed, or are they doomed to fail their residents, no matter how nice they are, because of where they are located?

Coleman lives in M Station apartments, in East Austin. M Station was completed in 2011, in a zip code where 31 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, the unemployment rate is 10.4 percent, and the median household income is around $36,000.

But the apartment building doesn’t look like what you might picture as housing for low-income people in a segregated slum. Each building is a different color—blue, yellow, red—and a wide pathway cuts through grass in between the units. There’s a jungle gym for children, basketball hoops, and neatly manicured flowers and trees. Children ride bikes around the parking lot, supervised by parents and relatives.

M Station was built by Foundation Communities, a developer that uses federal tax credits to create affordable housing in both low-income and high-income areas, including East and south Austin, a few developments in Dallas, and a few in the affluent suburbs of west Austin, the result of the state’s efforts to put affordable developments in posher areas.

Some commentators have recently criticized the “poverty-housing industry,” non-profit housing companies that profit from building affordable housing in poor neighborhoods. But there are non-profit housing groups that invest in those communities, too. Foundation Communities, for example, runs free after-school programs and summer tutoring, exercise classes, and computer programs for its residents in an effort to improve the local community.