Assisted Housing Mobility and the Success of Low-Income Minority Families: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Future Research

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Abstract

The federal Moving to Opportunity program (MTO) was designed to help poor minority families move from distressed, high poverty neighborhoods to better locations, thereby improving their quality of life and long term chances for well-being. Low income families living in concentrated poverty face a variety of challenges to their safety, health, and economic health, including poor schools, high crime and unemployment. This brief examines areas where the MTO program helped movers with those challenges, areas still problematic even after moving, and factors affecting those outcomes and considers policy implications for the next generation of assisted housing mobility initiatives.

Introduction

The court-ordered Gautreaux desegregation program and the federal Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration were both assisted housing mobility initiatives, designed to help poor minority families living in distressed neighborhoods move to better locations in hopes of improving both their quality of life and their long-term life chances. Because reliable answers to questions about what works in public policy are hard to find, it is tempting to label experimental programs like these as either “successes” or “failures.” Did they “prove” that using housing vouchers to relocate poor minority families “works” or not? As housing researchers with experience in both policy development and evaluation, we care deeply about what works, but we think this narrow framing is the wrong way to think about the lessons to date from Gautreaux and MTO.

In fact, Gautreaux “succeeded” in ways no one anticipated when it was launched, generating new optimism about the potential role of assisted housing mobility in helping black families escape poverty. These new ideas were further tested in the five-metropolitan MTO demonstration (directly inspired by Gautreaux); by other, nonexperimental mobility programs; and, to some extent, by HOPE VI. Considered together, these efforts represent a second round of experimentation with assisted housing mobility that is now generating important new lessons about how, where, and for whom to pursue the goal of expanding opportunity through wider housing choice. Therefore, this brief focuses not on whether Gautreaux or MTO “succeeded” or “failed,” but on what their results teach us about how to make assisted housing mobility policies more effective in the future. In doing so, we draw upon a decade of research by a broad array of scholars; these sources are identified at the end of the brief for those interesting in further reading.

Achange of address alone will never compensate for the major structural barriers low-skilled people face in our economy: the absence of crucial supports for work, such as universal health care and high-quality child care, or persistent inequalities in public education. And initiatives that promote housing mobility should not substitute for investing in the revitalization of distressed communities; both place-based and peoplebased strategies should be vigorously pursued. But assisted housing mobility has shown great promise—in particular, enabling people to live in healthier, more secure environments, free of fear and the constant risk of victimization. And we know how to build on this promise: the past decade has generated many hard-won lessons about how to design and implement a next generation of “smarter” assisted housing mobility strategies that clearly belong on the short list of policy priorities to advance a new opportunity agenda in America.

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

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