Struggling to Stay Out of High-Poverty Neighborhoods: Lessons from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment

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Abstract

MTO offered families living in concentrated poverty the chance to move to lower poverty areas, away from the high unemployment and high crime rates areas with the challenges and risks they present. This brief looks at whether the program was successful in helping families move away from those neighborhoods and stay away from them, noting both the reasons for subsequent moves and the characteristics of the neighborhoods to which they made those moves.

Introduction

Living in high-poverty neighborhoods, with their high unemployment rates, rampant crime, and struggling schools and other institutions, can have serious, negative consequences for the well-being and life chances of adults and children (see Ellen and Turner 2003). Distressed inner city public housing developments are some of the worst, most destructive environments for families. Many of these communities are economically isolated and racially segregated, are overrun with gangs and drug trafficking, and offer little opportunity for residents (Popkin, Gwiasda et al. 2000).

Encouraging findings from Chicago’s Gautreaux program, a court-ordered racial desegregation effort that helped public housing residents move to predominantly white, mostly suburban communities—an approach known as “assisted housing mobility”—suggested that such programs might be an effective way to help the inner-city poor. Studies indicated that Gautreaux adults who moved to the suburbs were more likely than their counterparts back in the city to be employed after moving and that children were more likely to finish high school and attend four-year colleges (Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000; Popkin, Buron et al. 2000; DeLuca and Rosenbaum 2002). However, the successful suburban movers were a select group, and the Gautreaux experience highlighted key challenges: only 19 percent of families that volunteered for the program successfully moved, and some families ended up back in the inner city (Keels et al. 2005; Turner and Briggs 2008). We still have much to learn about how long families need to be exposed to particular neighborhood environments in order to benefit from them; but understanding why families sometimes move back to high-poverty, unsafe areas after leaving them presents a fundamental challenge to the effective development of assisted mobility programs.

To help understand whether and how assisted housing mobility programs might succeed on a larger scale, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment in five metropolitan areas in 1994. MTO intended to give families in public and assisted housing the chance to move out of high crime, high-poverty neighborhoods into safer, low-poverty communities.1 The hope was that beyond being much safer, these destination areas would offer better housing, schools, and jobs, which would in turn improve families’ economic status, health, and educational outcomes. MTO targeted families living in some of the nation’s most distressed public housing in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Just over 5,300 very low income families volunteered for MTO in the five cities. The 4,608 who passed a basic screening were then randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: an experimental group, a Section 8 comparison group, or a control group. (See text box on page 11 for descriptions of the groups.)

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