The Urban Institute's Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development: Understanding How Place Matters for Kids

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Abstract

A central goal of U.S. social welfare policy is to ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential as productive adults. Yet it is increasingly clear that where children live plays a central role in determining their life chances. This paper provides an overview of The Urban Institute's Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development, which is dedicated to understanding the relationships between neighborhood-level factors and the well-being and development of children and youth and identifying and evaluating place-based, community-wide strategies to help children grow up to reach their full potential as adults.

Introduction

A central goal of U.S. social welfare policy is to ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential as productive adults. Yet it is increasingly clear that where children live plays a central role in determining their life chances. Children growing up in high-poverty neighborhoods, with extreme levels of racial and economic segregation and inadequate public services—police, schools, sanitation, grocery stores—are at risk for a range of negative outcomes, including poor physical and mental health, cognitive delays, risky sexual behavior, and delinquency (Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn 2000; Leventhal, Dupéré and Brooks-Gunn 2009; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002; Sampson et al. 2007). The consequences for these children’s life chances—and for society—are severe: they are more likely than those who grow up in less distressed communities to drop out of high school, get involved in gangs, become teen parents, and less likely to be employed when they reach adulthood (Johnson 2009).

Despite the importance of place, there has been comparatively little research on the ways that the neighborhoods where children live affect their transitions to adulthood or on the characteristics other than poverty that might influence their development. Even fewer programs or policies have tried to address the community mechanisms that might be causing such bad outcomes. Rather, the majority of research and policy attention concentrates on the individual child, the child’s family, and school settings, touching on many points along the path to adulthood, beginning with pregnancy planning, and continuing through pre- and postnatal care, early childhood development, schooling, and the myriad challenges confronting adolescents as they transition into adulthood. As a result, policies aimed at helping disadvantaged children and youth tend to focus on individual families and children and on school-based reforms. Even the highly regarded Harlem Children’s Zone, which does aim to address multiple dimensions of the broader community, has as its core a state-of-the-art charter school program (Tough 2008). The Urban Institute’s Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development is dedicated to filling this gap in research and policy knowledge, focusing on understanding the relationships between neighborhood-level factors and the well-being and development of children and youth and identifying and evaluating place-based, community-wide strategies to help children grow up to reach their full potential as adults.

In this framing paper, we first present a brief overview of theory and research on how social and physical context affects the life chances of children and youth. We then discuss the goals and initial research agenda for the Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development, including (1) better understanding the dimensions of neighborhood environments that lead to negative outcomes for children to develop targeted interventions; (2) drawing on lessons from our research on housing and community-based interventions to inform policy initiatives aimed at improving outcomes for youth, such as Choice Neighborhoods and Promise Zones; and (3) using primary and secondary data at the local and national levels to explore how place affects development, health, and risky behavior for children and youth.

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