Girls in the 'Hood: The Importance of Feeling Safe

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Abstract

The Moving to Opportunity program targeted families living in some of the nation's poorest, highest-crime neighborhoods and offered them a chance to move to lower poverty areas. One hope was that, away from concentrated poverty and the risks associated with it–including poor physical and mental health, risky sexual behavior and delinquency–families would fare better. This brief examines how adolescent girls benefited from moving out of high poverty and discusses why girls might have fared so much better than boys.

Introduction

"Foul. Just like in any other projects. . . . They’ll call them Bs [bitches], hos, tramps, sluts, stuff like that. They don’t care. They don’t have no respect for females at all. They beat up females over here and all that, throw them out of windows. Oh, my God. These projects is crazy. They throw their girlfriends out of windows and everything else, pull out guns on them and stuff. They don’t really too much care for females over here."
—Tonya, a girl growing up in public housing in Los Angeles, describing how men treat women and girls in her neighborhood.

Adolescents growing up in neighborhoods marked by concentrated poverty are at risk for a range of problems, including poor physical and mental health, risky sexual behavior, and delinquency. And, as Tonya’s description of life in her neighborhood indicates, girls growing up in high poverty face specific risks because of their gender: demoralizing effects of omnipresent and constant harassment, pervasive domestic violence, and high risk of sexual assault. These girls also experience pressure to become sexually active at increasingly younger ages, with early sexual initiation bringing its own hazards: pregnancy, the risk of sexually transmitted disease, and dropping out of school to care for children. All these hazards have serious long-term implications for the prospects of low income adolescent girls.

The federal government’s Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) was a unique effort to try to improve the life chances of very poor families with children by helping them leave the disadvantaged environments that contribute to these kinds of poor outcomes (see text box on page 7). Moving to a better neighborhood might benefit adolescents in several ways by providing better monitoring of behavior to reduce the threat of violent crime and disorder; offering stronger institutional resources for youth, notably high-quality schools, youth programs, and health services; providing access to more positive peer groups; and promoting changes in parents’ well-being and behavior because of increased opportunities and social pressures.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched MTO in 1994 in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. MTO targeted families living in some of the nation’s poorest, highest-crime communities—distressed public housing— and used housing subsidies to offer them a chance to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. The hope was that moving would provide these families with access to communities that offered better schools, city services—police, parks, libraries, sanitation—and economic opportunities. Participation in MTO was voluntary. Those who volunteered were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: a control group (families retained their public housing unit and received no new assistance); a Section 8 comparison group (families received the standard counseling and voucher subsidy for use in the private market); or an experimental group, which received a voucher usable only in a low-poverty neighborhood (less than 10 percent poor as of the 1990 Census).

(End of excerpt. The entire brief is available in PDF format.)

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

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