Comments

We examine short-run impacts of changes in residential neighborhoods on the well-being of families residing in high-poverty public housing projects who received Section 8 housing vouchers through a random lottery. Households offered vouchers experienced improvements in multiple measures of well-being relative to a control group, including increased safety, improved health among household heads, and fewer behavior problems among boys. There were no significant short-run impacts of vouchers on the employment, earnings, or welfare receipt of household heads. Children in households offered vouchers valid only in low poverty neighborhoods also had reduced likelihood of injuries, asthma attacks, and victimizations by crime.

Moving to Opportunity in Boston: Early Results of a Randomized Mobility Experiment

Assessing the Evidence on Neighborhood Effects from Moving to Opportunity

Background Previous research has demonstrated that children growing up in poor communities have limited access to high-performing schools, while more affluent neighborhoods tend to have higher-ranking schools and more opportunities for after-school programs and activities. Therefore, many researchers and policy makers expected not only that the families moving to low-poverty neighborhoods with the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program would gain access to zone schools with more resources but also that mothers would be more likely to meet middle-class parents who could provide information about academic programs and teachers, leading them to choose some of these new higher-quality-zone schools. However, research evaluating the effects of the MTO program on child outcomes 4-7 years after program moves found that while the schools attended by the MTO children were less poor and had higher average test scores than their original neighborhood schools, the differences were small: Before moving with the program, MTO children attended schools ranked at the 15th percentile statewide on average; 4-7 years after the move, they were attending schools that ranked at the 24th percentile on average. Purpose The fact that the residential changes brought about by the MTO experiment did not translate into much larger gains in school academic quality provides the impetus for our study. In other words, we explore why the experiment did not lead to the school changes that researchers and policy makers expected. With survey, census, and school-level data, we examine where families moved with the MTO program and how these moves related to changes in school characteristics, and how parents considered schooling options. Setting Although the MTO experiment took place in five cities (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore), we use data from the Baltimore site only. Population The sample in our study includes the low-income mothers and children who participated in the Baltimore site of the MTO housing voucher experiment. Ninety-seven percent of the families were headed by single black women. The median number of children was two, and average household income was extremely low, at $6,750. Over 60% received Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) as their primary source of income (at program entry in 1994), over 77% of household heads were unemployed, and 40% of the women had no high school degree or GED. Program The Moving to Opportunity program gave public housing residents in extremely poor neighborhoods in Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston a chance to apply for the program and move between 1994 and 1998. Families were randomly assigned into one of three groups: an experimental group that received housing counseling and a special voucher that could only be used in census tracts with 1990 poverty rates of less than 10%; a second treatment group, the Section 8 group, that received a regular voucher with no geographic restrictions on where they could move; and a control group that received no voucher through MTO, although they could continue to reside in their public housing units or apply for other housing subsidies (usually a regular Section 8 voucher). The program did not provide assistance with transportation costs, job searches, or local school information after the family relocated. Research Design We use survey data, census data, school-level data, and interviews from the Baltimore site of a randomized field trial of a housing voucher program. We present a mixed-methods case study of one site of the experiment to understand why the children of families who participated in the Baltimore MTO program did not experience larger gains in schooling opportunity. Conclusions Our article demonstrates that in order to discover whether social programs will be effective, we need to understand how the conditions of life for poor families facilitate or constrain their ability to engage new structural opportunities. The described case examples demonstrate why we need to integrate policies and interventions that target schooling in conjunction with housing, mental health services, and employment assistance. Future programs should train mobility counselors to inform parents about the new schooling choices in the area, help them weigh the pros and cons of changing their children's schools, and explain some of the important elements of academic programs and how they could help their children's educational achievement. Counselors could also assuage parents’ fears about transferring their children to new schools by making sure that receiving schools have information about the children and that little instruction time is lost in the transition between schools.

Experimental estimates from Moving to Opportunity (MTO) show no significant impacts of moves to lower‐poverty neighborhoods on adult economic self‐sufficiency four to seven years after random assignment. The authors disagree with Clampet‐Lundquist and Massey's claim that MTO was a weak intervention and therefore uninformative about neighborhood effects. MTO produced large changes in neighborhood environments that improved adult mental health and many outcomes for young females. Clampet‐Lundquist and Massey's claim that MTO experimental estimates are plagued by selection bias is erroneous. Their new nonexperimental estimates are uninformative because they add back the selection problems that MTO's experimental design was intended to overcome.

Moving to Opportunity and Tranquility: Neighborhood Effects on Adult Economic Self-Sufficiency and Health from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment

Composition or Context: Using Transportability to Understand Drivers of Site Differences in a Large-scale Housing Experiment.

Car access and long-term poverty exposure: Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment

Using data from a randomized experiment, to examine whether moving youth out of areas of concentrated poverty, where a disproportionate amount of crime occurs, prevents involvement in crime. We draw on new administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO families were randomized into an experimental group offered a housing voucher that could only be used to move to a low-poverty neighborhood, a Section 8 housing group offered a standard housing voucher, and a control group. This paper focuses on MTO youth ages 15-25 in 2001 (n = 4,643) and analyzes intention to treat effects on neighborhood characteristics and criminal behavior (number of violent- and property-crime arrests) through 10 years after randomization. We find the offer of a housing voucher generates large improvements in neighborhood conditions that attenuate over time and initially generates substantial reductions in violent-crime arrests and sizable increases in property-crime arrests for experimental group males. The crime effects attenuate over time along with differences in neighborhood conditions. Our findings suggest that criminal behavior is more strongly related to current neighborhood conditions (situational neighborhood effects) than to past neighborhood conditions (developmental neighborhood effects). The MTO design makes it difficult to determine which specific neighborhood characteristics are most important for criminal behavior. Our administrative data analyses could be affected by differences across areas in the likelihood that a crime results in an arrest.

This article provides an overview of an experimental residential relocation program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development known as Moving to Opportunity (MTO), currently in operation in five U.S. cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Because families are randomly assigned to three groups, each of which receives a different bundle of housing services, MTO provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the effects of concentrated urban poverty on the outcomes of families. Yet residential relocation can be an effective anti-poverty strategy only if families successfully relocate and if their new neighborhoods translate into improved labor-market, educational, or other outcomes. We illustrate the potential as well as the limits of residential relocation policies by focusing on the relationship between the housing market and educational opportunities in the Baltimore demonstration site.

Examining mediators of housing mobility on adolescent asthma: Results from a housing voucher experiment

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 de-concentrate 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. 243 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 chapters that report findings from each of the five MTO sites: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. The last section provides a set 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 low-poverty 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 244 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 adolescents there were no improvement sin 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...

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...

This article describes environmental exposures of adult participants in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing experiment over a four to seven year period from baseline to the interim evaluation. The MTO experiment randomized participants living in public housing or private assisted housing at baseline into experimental and control groups and provided a housing voucher for experimental group participants to move to neighbourhoods with less than 10% of the population below the poverty line. However, few studies have examined how this move affected exposures to health promoting environments. We used data on residential locations of MTO participants and archival data on the built and food environment to construct environmental exposure variables. MTO participants in the experimental and Section 8 groups lived in neighbourhoods with higher food prices, less high intensity development and more open space relative to the control group. The findings suggest that housing policies can have potential health consequences by altering health-related environmental exposures.

Evaluating Contradictory Experimental and Non-Experimental Estimates of Neighborhood Effects on Economic Outcomes for Adults