Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/KathrynLSPettit

Families in HUD's Moving to Opportunity program had the chance to move to neighborhoods with lower poverty, lower crime rates and, presumably, more opportunities for employment, good schools and better quality of life. Did they benefit from the moves and did they remain there to continue those benefits? This brief identifies patterns of moving for MTO families and the characteristics of the neighborhoods both from and to which they moved.

This is the sixth in a series of annual reports about housing in the Washington metropolitan region. It assembles and analyzes the most current data on housing conditions and trends in the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs. Last year's report focused on linkages between housing and schools in the District of Columbia and the metropolitan region. This year's report takes a regional perspective, examining how the region addresses housing for special needs populations. More specifically, the report assesses the housing options and services available to the elderly, disabled, and homeless and explores the consequences and opportunities for housing policy across the region.

This brief compares metropolitan census tracts that improved with respect to poverty in the 1990s (poverty rate decreased by 5 percentage points or more) with those that worsened (poverty rate increased by 5 points or more); looking at the racial composition of both types and how the shares in both types varied in different locations within metropolitan areas and in different types of metropolitan areas nationally. It finds that while trends by these measures were considerably more favorable than in the 1980s, the 1990s still saw a mix of improving and worsening neighborhoods almost everywhere, warranting local action to address the challenges that both imply.

This is the fifth in a series of annual reports that analyzes the most current data on housing conditions and trends in the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs. This year's report focuses on linkages between housing and schools in the District of Columbia and the metropolitan region. The availability and quality of public schools play a critical role in shaping demand for housing, and, correspondingly, housing market trends shape school enrollment patterns. To explore these issues, this report reviews trends in housing and public school enrollment in the Washington region, with more in-depth coverage of the District's neighborhoods.

Housing in the Nation's Capital 2005 is the fourth in a series of annual reports sponsored by the Fannie Mae Foundation about housing in the Washington region. It assembles and analyzes the most current data on housing conditions and trends in the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs. This year's report focuses on Washington, D.C., examining how the region's sustained prosperity is transforming the District's housing market. More specifically, the report assesses how the city's neighborhoods are changing and explores the consequences for housing opportunity and housing policy across the city.

During the 1990s, numerous public policy changes occurred that could have improved the health of mothers and infants in low-income neighborhoods. This paper examines trends in key maternal and child health indicators, using neighborhood level vital statistics and census data. Trends in four key indicators (births to teenagers; late prenatal care; low birthweight; and infant mortality) over the l990s are contrasted between high poverty and other neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, Ohio; Denver, Colorado; Marion County, Indiana; and Oakland, California. In all four metropolitan areas, trends in high poverty neighborhoods were more favorable than in other neighborhoods. Still, great disparities between high poverty and other neighborhoods remain. Experience from the l990s suggests that a combination of several intensive interventions can be effective at reducing disparities. (Howell, Embry, Pettit, Kathryn and Kingsley, Thomas. July/August 2005. "Trends in Maternal and Infant Health in Poor Urban Neighborhoods: Good News from the 1990s but Challenges Remain." Public Health Reports 120(4):409-417.)

Housing in the Nation's Capital 2004 is the third in a series of annual reports sponsored by the Fannie Mae Foundation about housing in the Washington region. It assembles and analyzes the most current data on housing conditions and trends in the District of Columbia and the surrounding suburbs. This year's report focuses on the challenges posed by the region's remarkable economic prosperity and highlights potential strategies for tackling the challenges this good fortune poses. It is our intention to provoke focused, sustained dialogue among our region's policy-makers, business representatives, community-based organizations, and advocates.

This commentary discusses the progress of local data intermediaries that form part of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP). The number of such intermediaries has recently expanded but the places with these capacities still account for a very small share of America's urban centers. The authors suggest that many more cities would benefit from developing systems like those of the NNIP partners and that an expanded effort is warranted to help them do so. The paper explains how these systems work, illustrates the contributions they make, and describes what it might take to support broader scale replication efficiently.

This paper describes a new project funded by the Brookings Institution Urban Market Initiative. In this project, the Urban Institute and NNIP partners in five cities will use parcel-level data as a basis for developing "decision support tools" to better guide the evolution of local land markets. The project will entail analysis to better understand real estate market potentials for different types of neighborhoods in these cities and the mixes of public actions generally appropriate to each type. The partners will also go further to develop computer-based tools that take advantage of the data to better design and implement specific courses of action in that context.

The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a collaborative effort to use local information in community building and policymaking. The task of building local data systems is given to a local intermediary in each of the 19 NNIP partnership cities. The partners obtain data from a variety of agencies, geocode it to the neighborhood level, and make it available to users. In the first seven years of the NNIP, the partners have learned several important lessons. First, data at the local (neighborhood) level are essential for developing public policy. Second, advances in technology over the past decade have made it possible to maintain these detailed local databases at relatively low cost. Third, there are a variety of types of local organizations that can effectively serve as the local partner, from academia to government, community foundations, or other community-based nonprofits. Fourth, as with most endeavors, good leadership is critical to successfully building the bridges across multiple agencies. Finally, a major lesson from the NNIP experience is that providing data is only the first step. Data must be used in ways that are visible, useful, and responsive to the community if the project is to retain local support and enthusiasm. (Journal of Public Health Management and Practice 9(3), 2003.)

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