The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration comprises two intertwined projects. For participating families, MTO was a HUD-funded rental assistance program that offered them a chance to move out of public housing projects located in deeply impoverished neighborhoods in five cities—Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Beginning in 1994, roughly 4,600 families volunteered to join MTO and became part of this housing mobility experiment. MTO is also the largest social experiment investigating the behavioral consequences for very low-income public housing residents of moving to a low-poverty neighborhood.
MTO's distinctiveness as a research project derives from its experimental design. It is the first randomized social experiment to examine whether, and with what effects, public housing families may be relocated into new, better-off neighborhoods. It enables researchers to compare the living conditions, choices, and personal outcomes of families randomly assigned to three different neighborhood environments: family public housing projects in poor neighborhoods, regular Section 8 program locations, and low-poverty communities.
The central question for the volume—as for the demonstration—is to what extent and under what conditions will moving out of a poor neighborhood and into a new, better-off area result in improvements in the lives of public housing families? Would families that elected to move become more socially and economically self-sufficient compared with families that did not make such moves? MTO's major contribution to both social science and to policy is that it permits a precise, relatively unbiased answer to the question of how much neighborhood matters.
This collection represents the first major presentation of the design, implementation, and early results for all five of MTO's cities. The contributors make use of a variety of research methods and data sources, including household and baseline surveys, census information, administrative or agency data, field observation, and qualitative interviews.
Although a number of articles have been published discussing results from individual cities, this collection is the first major summary and distillation of several years of research on the MTO experiment. It has been roughly a decade since MTO was authorized and this collection reflects research that has been conducted, analyzed, and distilled for this volume over a number of years. The research in this volume also partly reflects the synergy of ideas among the research teams.
Some contributors, such as the team that worked with the Baltimore site, began with a basic set of questions about the quality of schools in low-poverty communities (the results reported in chapter 5). They soon, however, significantly expanded their investigations to include multiple domains of life. In this case, their chapter 6 provides a summary of several separate investigations of developmental changes affecting children, teenagers, and adults in the Baltimore area. They report significant experimental effects on reading and math scores, welfare participation, and criminal behavior, but no effect on parents' wages or employment. Much of this research was done making use of nonintrusive methods, including the analysis of state and federal agency records. Other contributors, intrigued by the research of their peers, in turn sought out administrative data to learn whether comparable impacts could be detected for "their" families in other MTO locations. The research reported on the Los Angeles site, for example, reflects some of this evolution of interest.
We have divided this collection into three parts. The first part focuses on the legislative and political foundations of the demonstration and offers a summary of the results garnered from evidence and data across all five MTO locations. Chapter 1, by John Goering, Judith Feins, and Todd Richardson, offers a description of what MTO was designed to accomplish, followed by a synthesis of the important findings that have emerged to date. There is evidence presented about both the implementation of the demonstration as well as an overview of the effects of MTO on participating families. The research in this collection provides a relatively clear, although provisional, answer that neighborhood matters. Important, statistically significant changes have occurred in the lives of families that joined MTO.
Chapter 2, by John Goering, discusses historical and policy influences on MTO, including the Gautreaux demonstration in Chicago. At the time MTO was established it was uncertain whether HUD's main housing assistance program, the Section 8 voucher program, could be efficiently redesigned and implemented to assist poor, largely minority families to successfully relocate to private rental housing in neighborhoods potentially unaccustomed to such families. Early community opposition that occurred in the suburbs of Baltimore is also described in this chapter in order to help appreciate the constraints on HUD's implementation of economic deconcentration initiatives.
In chapter 3, Mark Shroder addresses the question of whether the volunteers for MTO who moved to new homes are similar to or different from other public housing families. He examines how and why successful movers in MTO differ from those who were unable to relocate. We learn that a number of household characteristics as well as program features (including housing mobility counseling) are associated with a higher probability of finding and leasing-up a new rental unit. Chapter 4, by Judith Feins, examines differences between the randomly assigned groups by the characteristics of the communities to which MTO families moved. We learn that, as intended, economic and racial mixing occurred in the aftermath of families joining the demonstration. But we also learn that there was less racial mixing than occurred in the Gautreaux program, and some evidence from data gathered in 2000 that families may be relocating to less diverse communities.
Part 2 of the book presents the core impact analyses of the effects of MTO upon the lives of children, teenagers, and adults. There are in-depth case studies of outcomes involving children and adults for the five MTO sites. Each chapter, which presents evidence on impacts roughly two to four years after families moved out of their low-income public housing developments, reflects the work of interdisciplinary teams of social scientists.
Each of the research teams initially designed relatively unique projects that addressed the early outcomes experienced by MTO families. Following their initial studies, a number of researchers felt that it was important to conduct additional inquiries. As we mentioned, Jens Ludwig and Helen Ladd began with an examination of the quality of the schools attended by children in Baltimore, as reported in chapter 5. They then proceeded to ask a range of additional questions about whether MTO had impacts on the educational experiences of individual children who participated in MTO, levels of juvenile crime, the wages and welfare status of families, and other issues. These additional studies, conducted from 1996 through 2002 with Helen Ladd, Greg Duncan, and other colleagues, are summarized in chapter 6.
Chapter 7 is on Boston and is by Lawrence Katz, Jeffrey Kling, and Jeffrey Liebman. In Boston we learn for the first time of important health effects on parents and children, including a decline in illnesses such as asthma, as a result of MTO.1
Chapter 8 is by Tama Leventhal and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and focuses on New York. It addresses critically important child and adult development issues using survey data on a large sample of New York families as the children and parents encountered their new communities. In this case, the methodological and analytic skills of child psychology reveal important evidence of changes in mental and physical health for both adults and children, including important evidence on the probable impact of neighborhood setting upon methods of parenting.
In chapter 9, Maria Hanratty, Sarah McLanahan, and Becky Pettit analyze the impact on early child and adult outcomes for families in Los Angeles. They include an assessment of labor market outcomes finding, as in Boston and Baltimore, that no detectable experimental effects have yet appeared. Finally, in chapter 10, Emily Rosenbaum, Laura Harris, and Nancy Denton examine a range of outcomes related to early child and adult outcomes for families that moved in Chicago.
Part 3 of the book presents summary observations, caveats, recommendations for future research, and policy speculations and worries about what lessons from MTO may be applicable to affordable housing policy in the United States. Chapter 11 by Ingrid Gould Ellen and Margery Austin Turner, as well as chapter 13 by George Galster, provide a sense of the demonstration's accomplishments but also of the potential risks associated with poverty deconcentration.
Chapter 12, by Sandra Newman, Joseph Harkness, and Wei-Jun Yeung, makes use of research that links the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to data on housing assistance. This data set represented, in our minds, the best possible nonexperimental surrogate for MTO and therefore an ideal place to learn whether effects comparable to those we expected to find in MTO might appear in the larger assisted housing population, as reflected in their unique panel data. That is, is there any evidence that the effects experienced by MTO families might also occur within the broader public housing- and project-based population? This chapter reveals that some neighborhood-based educational effects did occur for children, suggesting that neighborhood can affect opportunities within a wider public housing population, although their measures of neighborhood impact and housing assistance were necessarily limited compared with MTO experimental data.
The book concludes, in chapter 14, with suggestions concerning needed research and policy issues. The most central suggestion is that the as yet incomplete MTO research framework be finished to finally provide policymakers, legislators, and researchers their first opportunity to understand and compare the human and social consequences of different housing programs in diverse metropolitan communities. MTO will provide the ability—for the first time—to understand the benefits, the monetary and social costs, and the extent to which greater opportunities exist for children and adults after they leave behind the fear and risks of conventional public housing in concentrated poverty areas.
NOTES
The bulk of the chapters in this collection are substantially revised versions of papers initially presented at a conference on MTO research results sponsored by HUD, with some financial support from the Fannie Mae Foundation. It was held in Washington, D.C., in November 1997. Most of the contributors to this collection were selected in an open, peer-reviewed grant competition for research on the first phase of MTO families' experiences. Between the initial conference and the papers presented in this collection, time was needed for most authors to obtain more complete samples of MTO families at their sites. In one site, this required delaying survey data collection until 1999 when all families were enrolled and address files were finally available.
1. Katz, Larry, Jeffrey Kling, and Jeffrey Liebman. 2001. "Moving to Opportunity in Boston: Early Results of a Randomized Mobility Experiment." Quarterly Journal of Economics (May) 607-54. The chapter presented in this collection is less technical and contains a few substantive additions. Table 2 presents differences in mobility for subgroups, depending upon their baseline characteristics. Table 6 presents treatment effects for specific behavior problems instead of an overall index. Table 10 reports the results from the survey question about welfare and employment (whereas the article only reported administrative results).
Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment, Edited by John Goering and Judith D. Feins, is available in paperback from the Urban Institute Press (6" x 9", 440 pages, ISBN 0-87766-713-6, $34.50).
