Moving To Opportunity Research Articles

Moving to opportunity: the story of an American experiment to fight ghetto poverty

PREFACE 1. Places and Lives 2. Ghetto Poverty Before and After Katrina 3. Great Expectations and Muddling Through: DESIGNING AND LAUNCHING THE EXPERIMENT 4. The Unequal Geography of Opportunity 5. Moving to Security 6. When Your Neighborhood is Not Your Community 7. Struggling to Stay out of High Poverty Neighborhoods: FINDING GOOD HOUSING 8. Finding Good Schools 9. Finding Work 10. Lessons APPENDIX. STUDYING MOVING TO OPPORTUNITY WORKS CITED

Moving Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: How Girls Fare Better than Boys

Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 teens in Baltimore and Chicago. They find that daily routines, fitting in with neighborhood norms, neighborhood navigation strategies, interactions with peers, friendship making, and distance from father figures may contribute to how girls who moved via MTO benefited more than boys.

Does Moving to Better Neighborhoods Lead to Better Schooling Opportunities? Parental School Choice in an Experimental Housing Voucher Program

BackgroundPrevious 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.PurposeThe 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.SettingAlthough the MTO experiment took place in five cities (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore), we use data from the Baltimore site only.PopulationThe 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.ProgramThe 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 DesignWe 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.ConclusionsOur 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.

Girls in the ’Hood: How Safety Affects the Life Chances of Low-Income Girls

Adolescents growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods are at risk for a range of negative outcomes. Girls face specific threats because of their gender—omnipresent harassment, pressure for early sexual initiation, pervasive intimate partner violence, and high risk of sexual assault.This article uses mixed-methods data from the Three-City Study of Moving to Opportunity (MTO) to explore how moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods may have influenced adolescent girls’ life chances. MTO families moved to neighborhoods with lower levels of violent crime overall, but MTO girls also experienced a substantial reduction in the “female fear,” Gordon and Riger’s term for the fear of sexual harassment, coercion, and rape. The authors argue that this change is a plausible explanation for the notable improvements in MTO girls’ well-being.

Comparing residential mobility programs: design elements, neighborhood placements, and outcomes in MTO and Gautreaux

Reviewing prior studies of two residential mobility programs, the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity (MTO) programs, this paper examines whether program design elements may explain differences in neighborhood placements, which in turn may explain the programs' different individual outcomes. While MTO has a stronger research design than Gautreaux, it creates more modest changes in environment. Specifically, we find that the two programs create very different kinds of neighborhood placements. Compared with Gautreaux, MTO moves were shorter distances and to census tracts with higher poverty rates, larger minority populations, worse schools, and lower employment rates. These differences in neighborhood placements may explain why Gautreaux found larger impact than MTO in education and employment outcomes and in duration of moves. Although often ignored, design elements may be crucial to the success of programs, and several design elements may explain these different placements.

Ending the cycle of poverty through socio-economic integration: A comparison of Moving to Opportunity (MTO) in the United States and the Bijlmermeer Revival Project in the Netherlands

In many advanced industrialized countries, one trend in housing programs has been to attempt to reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty and other social problems through the “de-concentration” of urban poverty. In this article, we compare two re-location and urban renewal programs in the United States and the Netherlands, that we argue are based, in part, on assumptions about neighbourhood effects. This neighbourhood effects literature contends that living in close proximity to other impoverished people has a negative effect on the behaviour, dispositions, and welfare of low-income individuals, particularly children. Specifically, this article compares the “Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Experiment” (MTO) in the United States and the “Bijlmermeer Revitalization Project” in the Netherlands. The MTO and Bijlmermeer programs have demonstrated that a multifaceted approach to socio-spatial integration can provide significant social benefits to the poor. At the same time, these projects reveal that re-location policies must take into account these groups’ specific contexts in order to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes through such programs. The goal of reducing concentrations of poverty in urban centres should include opportunities for re-location, while simultaneously working towards the urban renewal of high poverty urban neighbourhoods. We argue that maintaining political and public support for urban poverty de-concentration programs requires further experimental, qualitative and quantitative research aimed at explaining the complex and non-linear relationship between urban concentrations of poverty and social problems. This would also allow for targeting of de-concentration efforts to improve social and economic opportunities for all.

Does moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood improve mental health? A realist review of ‘Moving to Opportunity’

Ray Pawson's realist review method was used to analyse 22 evaluations/reviews of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing intervention. MTO was a randomized controlled trial that moved families from high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhoods in five US cities between 1994 and 2006. This realist review focussed on mental health outcomes of families who moved, as well as the mechanisms through which moving influenced mental health. It identified and assessed the effectiveness of the underlying theory driving MTO, and suggests revising the existing theory. This realist review suggests that, even when moves are voluntary, there are potentially negative mental health outcomes from these types of social interventions. Directing resources towards the improvement of existing communities is one way of improving health outcomes for all community residents.

Reexamining the moving to opportunity study and its contribution to changing the distribution of poverty and ethnic concentration

For the past decade and a half a concerted effort has been undertaken to determine whether policy interventions in residential location can solve the problems of inner-city poverty and racial concentration. Studies based on data from the Gautreaux litigation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)-sponsored Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program have provided an overall optimistic interpretation of the possibilities of improving inner-city lives via mobility vouchers and counseling. A reanalysis of the data from the MTO program, focusing specifically on African American households, suggests greater caution in the interpretation of the findings from either Gautreaux or the MTO program. No statistically significant difference exists between the percentage of poor or the percentage of African Americans in the current neighborhoods between MTO and Section 8 experimental groups. In some cases, there is no statistically significant difference between those who move with a voucher and those who move without any assistance at all. Although there is some evidence that MTO programs have brought specific gains for individual families, claims for the MTO program as a whole need to be treated with a great deal more caution than they have been to date.

What Can We Learn about Neighborhood Effects from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment?

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 INEQUALITY: NEIGHBORHOOD EFFECTS AND EXPERIMENTS MEET STRUCTURE.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) housing experiment has proven to be an important intervention not just in the lives of the poor, but in social science theories of neighborhood effects. Competing causal claims have been the subject of considerable disagreement, culminating in the debate between Clampet-Lundquist and Massey (2008) and Ludwig et al. (2008). This paper assesses the debate by clarifying analytically distinct questions posed by neighborhood-level theories, reconceptualizing selection bias as a fundamental social process worthy of study in its own right rather than as a statistical nuisance, and reconsidering the scientific method of experimentation, and hence causality, in the social world of the city. I also analyze MTO and independent survey data from Chicago to examine trajectories of residential attainment. Although MTO provides crucial leverage for estimating neighborhood effects on individuals, as proponents rightly claim, I demonstrate the implications imposed by a stratified urban structure and how MTO simultaneously provides a new window on the social reproduction of concentrated inequality.

Why did the moving to opportunity experiment not get young people into better schools?

Educational failure is one of the costliest and most visible problems associated with ghetto poverty. We explore whether housing assistance that helps low‐income families move to better neighborhoods can also improve access to good schools. Research on the Gautreaux housing desegregation program indicated significant, long‐term educational benefits, yet results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment showed no measurable impacts on school outcomes for the experimental group. We use interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to explore this puzzle. Most MTO families did not relocate to communities with substantially better schools, and those who did often moved again after a few years. Where parents had meaningful school choices, these were typically driven by poor information obtained from insular social networks or by cultural logic centered on avoiding ghetto‐type school insecurity and disorder, not garnering academic opportunity. Those factors may not shift if poor families with less educated parents are served by a relocation‐only strategy.

Is Crime Contagious?

Understanding whether criminal behavior is “contagious” is important for law enforcement and for policies that affect how people are sorted across social settings. We test the hypothesis that criminal behavior is contagious by using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing mobility experiment to examine the extent to which lower local area crime rates decrease arrest rates among individuals. Our analysis exploits the fact that the effect of treatment group assignment yields different types of neighborhood changes across the five MTO demonstration sites. We use treatment by site interactions as instruments for measures of neighborhood crime rates, poverty, and racial segregation in our analysis of individual arrest outcomes. We are unable to detect evidence in support of the contagion hypothesis. Neighborhood racial segregation appears to be the most important explanation for across‐neighborhood variation in arrests for violent crimes in our sample, perhaps because drug market activity is more common in high‐minority neighborhoods.

Comments

Comments [Return to Article] Jens Ludwig: There is widespread belief that a person's neighborhood of residence affects labor market outcomes, particularly for low-skilled minority workers living in central cities. This view stems from the results reported in a large body of theoretical and empirical research from across the social sciences. Yet the conclusion that neighborhoods matter for labor market outcomes seems to stand in sharp contrast to research on the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized mobility experiment, which shows little impact on work or earnings measured four to seven years after random assignment.1 I consider ways of reconciling these conflicting strands of research as well as the implications for public policies designed to improve the labor market prospects of disadvantaged workers. I focus on three of the leading explanations that have been offered to explain why findings from MTO conflict with most people's reading of the existing literature on neighborhood effects: 1) the possibility that MTO did not generate large enough differences in neighborhood environments to affect outcomes; 2) whether estimates of neighborhood effects on the MTO population, which consists of the subset of public housing families who volunteered for the demonstration, generalize to other groups; and 3) the possibility that the effects of mobility on labor market outcomes become more pronounced over time. This paper by Turney and her colleagues provides useful information on these candidate explanations in the form of detailed, qualitative accounts of MTO families' experiences in the Baltimore demonstration site. After discussing previous hypotheses to reconcile MTO with existing research in light of findings from this work and other studies, I consider the evidence on another explanation that seems to have received less discussion—the possibility of bias with the previous nonexperimental research. [End Page 173] Did MTO Change Neighborhoods Enough? It is natural to wonder whether MTO actually changed neighborhoods enough to plausibly affect labor market or other outcomes. After all, of those families assigned to the MTO experimental group, only a fraction moved through the MTO program (58 percent in the Baltimore demonstration site). Experimental-group families were only required to live in their new low-poverty neighborhoods for one year, at which point they were free to use their vouchers to relocate to higher-poverty areas, which many chose to do. In addition, some control-group families wound up moving to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates over time on their own or as a result of HUD demolitions of public housing projects. Nevertheless, there are at least three reasons to believe that MTO generated important changes in the neighborhood environments of program participants, and therefore has something useful to say about the neighborhoods' role on labor market outcomes. First, across all five MTO cities, assignment to the experimental (rather than control) group reduced poverty rates by about 15 percent of the control group average in the tracts in which families were living four to seven years after random assignment (see table 1). In the Baltimore MTO site the experimental-control difference is more like 20 percent of the control mean for tract poverty, almost as large (17 percent) for tract employment rates, and more than twice as large (42 percent) as a share of the control mean for the presence of affluent (college-educated) adults in the neighborhood. These across-group differences pool together the experiences of families in the experimental group who did and did not move through MTO. The impact on those families who actually moved through the experimental MTO treatment in Baltimore will be about 1.7 times as large as the overall across-group differences.2 The one exception to this general pattern of MTO-induced changes in neighborhood attributes is for racial integration, which was more modestly affected by the MTO experimental treatment. A second reason to believe that MTO generated important changes in neighborhood environments is that MTO participants themselves perceive important differences in their neighborhood environments, as suggested by [End Page 174] the qualitative interviews described by this...

Moving to Opportunity: The Demonstration's Design and its Effects on Mobility

Poverty concentration in urban neighbourhoods may have detrimental long-term effects on residents. The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment in the US randomly assigned high-poverty public housing residents to a programme that subsidised occupancy in non-poor areas, permitting controlled analysis of neighbourhood impacts. In this paper, MTO data are used to answer the following questions. How much impact can a one-time intervention have on the subsequent residential experience of poor families from high-poverty neighbourhoods? It is found that the impacts on subsequent residential experience are statistically and practically significant. Are poor families who move to non-poor neighbourhoods significantly different from poor families who do not, in (usually) unmeasured characteristics? It is found that yes, they are. What difference does moving to a better neighbourhood make? There are large gains in safety, other improvements in neighbourhood quality and no loss in social ties.

Neighborhood Effects on Crime for Female and Male Youth: Evidence From a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment*

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by MTO to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency. The offer to relocate to lower-poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes, relative to a control group. For males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime, at least in the short run, but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests. The gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments.

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

We study adult economic and health outcomes in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, a randomized housing mobility experiment in which families living in high-poverty U.S. public housing projects in five cities were given vouchers to help them move to private housing units in lower-poverty neighborhoods. An experimental group was offered vouchers valid only in a low-poverty neighborhood; a Section 8 group was offered traditional housing vouchers without geographic restriction; a control group was not offered vouchers. Our sample consists largely of black and Hispanic female household heads with children. Five years after random assignment, the families offered housing vouchers through MTO lived in safer neighborhoods that had significantly lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects on adult employment, earnings, or public assistance receipt - though our sample sizes are not sufficiently large to rule out moderate effects in either direction. In contrast, we do find significant mental health benefits of the MTO intervention for the experimental group. We also demonstrate a more general pattern for the mental health results using both voucher groups of systematically larger effect sizes for groups experiencing larger changes in neighborhood poverty rates. In our analysis of physical health outcomes, we find a significant reduction in obesity for the experimental group, but no significant effects on four other aspects of physical health (general health, asthma, physical limitations, and hypertension) or on our summary measure of physical health.

Neighborhood Effects on Crime for Female and Male Youth: Evidence from a Randomized Housing Voucher Experiment

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by MTO to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency. The offer to relocate to lower-poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes, relative to a control group. For males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime, at least in the short run, but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests. The gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments.

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

Children, Youth and Environments. Vol 14, No.1 (2004) ISSN 1546-2250 Response to Review of Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment John Goering City University of New York Judith D. Feins Abt Associates Citation: Goering, John and Judith D. Feins. (2004). “Response to Review of Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment.” Children, Youth and Environments 14(1). We appreciate the opportunity to comment and will use this time to address ongoing MTO research. The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration- among the most important ongoing demonstrations in American housing policy- is a multi-city, mixed-method research project that is roughly half way through the evaluation process of examining neighborhood effects on the lives and life fortunes of youth and families in the context of an experimental research design. Our book title, Choosing a Better Life? was explicitly ended with a question mark as we were aware of how much more research was both needed and planned. The small grant research reported in the book has been followed with a large-scale interim evaluation released in 20031 and it is anticipated that a final impacts study will occur around 2007. The interim evaluation, unlike the research for the book, involved standardized cross-site surveys and the use of administrative data for a large panel with roughly 11,000 respondents, including both adults and children. The first comment is therefore that there are now more current evaluation findings some of which confirm and others that disconfirm the initial results reported in the book. Key among the major consistent effects are the notably lower poverty rates in the neighborhoods into which families first moved and are currently 277 living. Closely related is the now clearer finding that MTO did not explicitly seek and did not achieve racial desegregation along with its deconcentration of poverty. The longer-term consequences of this is an issue of continuing curiosity and debate. While racial desegregation was not among the main motivations for participating families, moving away from extremely high levels of crime was. Reductions in the fear of crime was both the major motivator of their mobility and a major successful reported outcome. Further, among the major findings that are now clearer and more firmly established is that mothers experienced both reduced mental stress as well as related improvements in obesity. These appear as quite significant alterations in their lives that, we hypothesize, will subsequently lead to other adaptations and improvements. Another domain of results that have surprised many of us is the fact that children have apparently responded differently to the experience of lower poverty. It appears, for reasons that are as yet uncertain, that girls’ overall behavior has substantially improved, including less drinking and smoking and reduced levels of arrest, while the results for boys are less encouraging. They appear to be engaged in more drinking and smoking and in property crime, although there is discussion about how significant the latter finding is. Among the issues that warrant comment is whether the findings and analysis of the Gautreaux housing mobility program in Chicago correctly established the theoretical foundations for causal analysis of behavioral change as a result of significant residential relocation through the Section 8 program. Gautreaux methodology has been critiqued by others, with the clear sense that response and selectivity bias may have generated an unrealistic level of expectations about how rapidly and in what ways mothers and children will respond to moves to lower-poverty communities. The reviewer therefore correctly cautions about MTO’s designers’ optimism. It was indeed created in the research-driven “euphoria” which early Gautreaux results offered in a policy context starved for viable alternatives to poverty and race concentration. There is currently an ongoing set of research with which we both are engaged in different ways. One project currently in the field is 278 making use of both qualitative interviews and ethnographic studies to more clearly reveal the manner in which families make use of their neighborhood contexts, how gender differences are experienced differently by setting, and how major institutional options- most notably education and employment- are valued and used by adults and older children with the opportunity...

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

Children, Youth and Environments. Vol 14, No.1 (2004) ISSN 1546-2250 Response to Review of Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment John Goering City University of New York Judith D. Feins Abt Associates Citation: Goering, John and Judith D. Feins. (2004). “Response to Review of Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment.” Children, Youth and Environments 14(1). We appreciate the opportunity to comment and will use this time to address ongoing MTO research. The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration- among the most important ongoing demonstrations in American housing policy- is a multi-city, mixed-method research project that is roughly half way through the evaluation process of examining neighborhood effects on the lives and life fortunes of youth and families in the context of an experimental research design. Our book title, Choosing a Better Life? was explicitly ended with a question mark as we were aware of how much more research was both needed and planned. The small grant research reported in the book has been followed with a large-scale interim evaluation released in 20031 and it is anticipated that a final impacts study will occur around 2007. The interim evaluation, unlike the research for the book, involved standardized cross-site surveys and the use of administrative data for a large panel with roughly 11,000 respondents, including both adults and children. The first comment is therefore that there are now more current evaluation findings some of which confirm and others that disconfirm the initial results reported in the book. Key among the major consistent effects are the notably lower poverty rates in the neighborhoods into which families first 247 moved and are currently living. Closely related is the now clearer finding that MTO did not explicitly seek and did not achieve racial desegregation along with its de-concentration of poverty. The longer-term consequences of this is an issue of continuing curiosity and debate. While racial desegregation was not among the main motivations for participating families, moving away from extremely high levels of crime was. Reductions in the fear of crime was both the major motivator of their mobility and a major successful reported outcome. Further, among the major findings that are now clearer and more firmly established is that mothers experienced both reduced mental stress as well as related improvements in obesity. These appear as quite significant alterations in their lives that, we hypothesize, will subsequently lead to other adaptations and improvements. Another domain of results that have surprised many of us is the fact that children have apparently responded differently to the experience of lower poverty. It appears, for reasons that are as yet uncertain, that girls’ overall behavior has substantially improved, including less drinking and smoking and reduced levels of arrest, while the results for boys are less encouraging. They appear to be engaged in more drinking and smoking and in property crime, although there is discussion about how significant the latter finding is. Among the issues that warrant comment is whether the findings and analysis of the Gautreaux housing mobility program in Chicago correctly established the theoretical foundations for causal analysis of behavioral change as a result of significant residential relocation through the Section 8 program. Gautreaux methodology has been critiqued by others, with the clear sense that response and selectivity bias may have generated an unrealistic level of expectations about how rapidly and in what ways mothers and children will respond to moves to lower-poverty communities. The reviewer therefore correctly cautions about MTO’s designers’ optimism. It was indeed created in the research-driven “euphoria” which 248 early Gautreaux results offered in a policy context starved for viable alternatives to poverty and race concentration. There is currently an ongoing set of research with which we both are engaged in different ways. One project currently in the field is making use of both qualitative interviews and ethnographic studies to more clearly reveal the manner in which families make use of their neighborhood contexts, how gender differences are experienced differently by setting, and how major institutional options- most notably education and employment- are valued and used by adults and older children with the...

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