Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 1 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment Goering, John and Feins, Judith D. (2003). Washington D.C.: Urban Institute Press; 421 pages. $34.50. ISBN 0877667136. Poverty in American cities became increasingly concentrated between 1970 and 1990. The black middle class that had been largely confined to core neighborhoods took advantage of the gains made by the Fair Housing movement and moved out of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Employment opportunities left core areas as economic activities of all kinds decentralized. Left behind was a more uniformly poor population faced with growing problems of violence, drug activity, and joblessness. A number of studies completed in the 1980s and 90s documented the growth of concentrated poverty and the range of social pathologies that have resulted from the extreme levels of social, political, and economic marginalization endemic to these areas. Despite the fact that the 2000 census shows a turnaround in poverty trends, there remains strong interest in creating public policies to deconcentrate poverty. One such policy aimed at facilitating the movement of poor families out of high poverty neighborhoods is the Moving To Opportunity (MTO) program, a federally funded experiment created in 1992 and operating in five major cities. This program provides low-income families in high-poverty public housing complexes with a housing voucher that allows them to move, along with their subsidy, to a low-poverty neighborhood. Choosing a Better Life?, an edited collection by John Goering and Judith Feins, is a compilation of evaluation studies of the MTO program. The book provides important insight into whether and how the program has worked and what changes it has induced in the lives of public housing families. The book is divided into three parts. The first provides an overview of the program and a summary of the issues related to housing mobility and concentrated poverty. Part II presents a set of 273 chapters that report findings from each of the five MTO sites: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The last section provides asset of research and policy implications. For those interested in the impacts of this program on the lives of children and youth, Part II is of greatest interest. Several of these chapters present information on the effects on young children and adolescents of moving away from high poverty neighborhoods. Several potential neighborhood effects are considered, including educational achievement and experience among young children and adolescents, problematic behavior among youth, social interactions, health, the future expectations of children, and involvement in extracurricular activities. The MTO program randomly assigned applicant families to one of three groups, the experimental group that received a housing voucher and mobility counseling in order to make a move to a lowpoverty neighborhood, a comparison group of families who received only the voucher and who could move anywhere they could find a unit and a willing landlord, and a third group – the stay-in-place control group. The program expectations were that families in the experimental group would benefit the most because they moved to low-poverty neighborhoods. The findings from the five sites, however, show two overriding patterns. First, the positive effects of moving to low-poverty neighborhoods are sporadic at best and often weak. Second, the data suggest that both the experimental families (those who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods) and the comparison group families (those who were given vouchers but who were not restricted to moving to low-poverty neighborhoods) showed improvements. This suggests that the primary benefit of this program comes less from moving children to low-poverty neighborhoods and more from moving them out of the highly concentrated poverty that characterizes much of the public housing stock in major American cities. In Baltimore, young children who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods showed increased math and reading scores compared to control group children. There were no group differences in school behavior measures however. Among 274 adolescents there were no improvements in scores. In fact, the findings showed that experimental group adolescents were more likely than the control group to be held back in school, to experience disciplinary actions and to drop out. The...