WASHINGTON, May 7 (UPI) -- Former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., sees doing away with public housing projects as an important step toward ending poverty in the United States.
The Democratic presidential hopeful told the Washington Post reducing racial and economic segregation means dispersing the poor into better neighborhoods and suburbs, closer to good schools and jobs.
"If we truly believe we are all equal, then we should live together, too," Edwards says.
To achieve this, he proposes replacing public housing with rental vouchers.
A millworker's son who became a multimillionaire trial lawyer, Edwards spent two years studying poverty at a center he founded at the University of North Carolina, the Post said.
The platform he produced involves a number of ideas that are shared by some of the other presidential candidates but his suggestion for rental vouchers faces opposition.
"The Edwards proposal is a good idea," says economist Jeffrey Kling of the Brookings Institution, "but I don't think it's likely to accomplish the primary aim he intends."
A major federal experiment found that dispersing poor families did not improve earnings or school performance.
