Fayetteville: the biggest documented leverage

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the City of Fayetteville, North Carolina and the Fayetteville Metropolitan Housing Authority $25,115,578 through the FY2025 Choice Neighborhoods Implementation grant program, the city announced September 2. It is the first such implementation grant in eastern North Carolina.

The award is projected to leverage more than $531 million in public and private investment to carry out the Murchison Choice Transformation Plan, which will replace all 60 units at the 56-year-old Murchison Townhouses public housing site on a one-for-one basis while creating 323 new mixed-income apartments across the Murchison Townhouses and Elliott Properties sites. Pennrose will serve as the housing lead and Urban Strategies as the people lead, according to the city's release; North Carolina Construction News reported the underlying housing development represents about $95.7 million in new investment, with amenities including in-unit washers and dryers and a fitness center, plus 35 new for-sale homes nearby. Eligible residents retain a right to return.

Gainesville and New Bern

Gainesville, Florida and the Gainesville Housing Authority won a $25 million Choice Neighborhoods grant, announced at a September 3 city commission meeting, to redevelop the Lake Terrace and Pine Meadows apartments — a combined 180 units near the ELITE Force Training Center — and to help revitalize the East University Avenue corridor, according to the Gainesville Sun and Main Street Daily News. The city and housing authority had received a $500,000 planning grant three years earlier and applied for the implementation award in March 2026 alongside 13 other cities nationally.

New Bern, North Carolina won $25.1 million for Trent Court, a public housing community where Hurricane Florence left 108 units uninhabitable in 2018, according to reporting from the leads reviewed for this article; Estate Wire was not able to independently retrieve a primary HUD or New Bern city document confirming the figure and cause, so that detail should be read as a single-source report pending confirmation.

What Choice Neighborhoods does and doesn't guarantee

Choice Neighborhoods implementation grants are HUD's flagship vehicle for financing the replacement of distressed public housing with mixed-income developments, but they typically fund only a fraction of total project cost — Fayetteville's roughly $25.1 million grant is expected to leverage more than 20 times that amount in additional public and private financing, a ratio that depends on assembling other funding sources such as Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, local bonds and private capital that are not guaranteed at the time of the HUD award.

HUD had not published a comprehensive national list of every FY2025 Choice Neighborhoods Implementation award at the time this article was reported, so the three grants described here should not be read as an exhaustive account of the program's national FY2025 allocation.

The program's lineage: from HOPE VI to Choice Neighborhoods

Choice Neighborhoods is the direct successor to HOPE VI, the public-housing redevelopment program Congress authorized in 1992 amid a well-documented crisis of deteriorating, underfunded and poorly managed public housing developments concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods. Between 1993 and 2011, HUD made 260 HOPE VI revitalization grants totaling $6 billion, funding the demolition and mixed-income reconstruction of severely distressed public housing nationwide, according to HUD's own Office of Policy Development and Research.

HUD created Choice Neighborhoods in 2010 as HOPE VI wound down, retaining the mixed-income redevelopment model but adding an explicit neighborhood-level focus on schools, jobs and other community assets around the housing itself, not just the housing stock. By 2017, HUD's research office had tracked $633 million in Choice Neighborhoods implementation grants awarded since the program's creation, a fraction of HOPE VI's cumulative total that reflects both a smaller annual appropriation and the newer program's more selective, competitive award structure. The roughly $75 million split among Fayetteville, Gainesville and New Bern this year is consistent with that pattern of concentrated, multi-city rounds rather than the broader annual distribution HOPE VI achieved at its peak.

Researchers have found that six years after Choice Neighborhoods grants were first awarded, household incomes at redevelopment sites had increased and resident attrition — the rate at which households stop receiving housing assistance, often because they cannot secure a unit at the rebuilt property — was lower than patterns observed at comparable HOPE VI sites, according to a 2017 HUD Cityscape policy brief. That finding does not resolve the longer-running debate among researchers and advocates over how consistently either program has preserved deeply subsidized units for the lowest-income households originally displaced by demolition, an issue the brief itself frames as unsettled.