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Abstract
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.
Introduction
The 1980s saw a marked increase in the
number of inner-city neighborhoods with
high concentrations of poverty. By the start
of the next decade, Wilson (1987) and other
scholars had documented the seriously
detrimental effects such neighborhoods
have on their residents, and poverty deconcentration
had become a topic of interest
in Washington. One federal effort
launched to learn more about how to
address the issue was the Moving to
Opportunity demonstration (MTO).
Implemented by the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD), MTO enrolled more than 4,600
low-income families in five metropolitan
areas (metros)—Baltimore, Boston,
Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York—
between 1994 and 1998. The participants,
most of whom were racial or ethnic
minorities and all of whom were living in
inner-city HUD-assisted housing projects,
were randomly assigned to one of three
treatment groups: an experimental group,
a Section 8 group, and a control group
(see text box on page 11 for more details).
As a part of an interim evaluation,
MTO families were interviewed in 2002,
four to eight years after they began participation.
This brief examines the characteristics
of the neighborhoods to which MTO
families in all groups had moved as of
those interviews. The interim assessment
included a basic analysis of this topic, relying
primarily on measures from the U.S.
Census (Orr et al. 2003). This brief summarizes
the results of that analysis but then
goes further in two respects:
1. by comparing the neighborhoods of the
various groups using a broader array of
indicators (e.g., distance from central
business district, crime rate) and showing
how the MTO destination neighborhoods
compare with those of all
Section 8 voucher recipients in the MTO
metros, and
2. by focusing analysis on one group
that is of special interest for policy:
experimental-group families that moved
again after their initial move to a lowpoverty
neighborhood.
The new data strongly reinforce findings
of the earlier research, showing that
the neighborhoods experimental-group
families moved to initially were indeed
better than those they had left behind in
many dimensions. And the magnitude of
the differences is striking. For example, the
violent crime rate in their new neighborhoods
was on average 72 percent lower
than that of their old neighborhoods.
(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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