Affiliate Spotlight: Lawrence Katz on researching housing and economic mobility to create moves to opportunity
A new paper summarizing preliminary findings from the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) study was just released. Results demonstrate that helping low-income families overcome barriers to moving to higher-opportunity areas may be a promising strategy for reducing residential segregation and promoting economic mobility. We sat down with Lawrence Katz—Co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America and one of the authors on the CMTO study—to collect his reflections on the preliminary results, how this study builds upon his previous research, and how these and future results may inform housing policy moving forward.
You were one of the original evaluators on the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) study, which inspired the current CMTO study. How did you first become interested in researching the effects of place and housing mobility?
I first started working on housing and mobility as an undergraduate in the late 1970s at UC Berkeley, when restrictive land use regulations and exclusionary zoning practices serving to keep out lower-income and minority families were spreading. My first published paper as an undergraduate in 1980 (with Stuart Gabriel and Jennifer Wolch) was on the growth of land use regulations and exclusionary zoning in the San Francisco Bay Area following the passage of Proposition 13 in California in 1978. My senior thesis was on the impact of land use regulations on housing prices and how such policies could exacerbate racial and economic residential segregation. And in the early 90s, I conducted a large-scale survey with Anne Case looking at neighborhood effects for youth in Boston.
In 1993, when I was chief economist in the U.S. Department of Labor under the Clinton administration, we had the incredible opportunity to conduct a randomized evaluation with HUD to measure the effects of neighborhoods on the outcomes for low-income families—this is where the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration originated building on the Gautreaux project in Chicago and the groundwork of the legendary civil rights lawyer Alexander Polikoff. As an academic after my return to Harvard, I had the opportunity to collaborate on the early, interim, and final evaluations of the MTO experiment.
What motivated the CMTO study? How does this study build from MTO findings?
CMTO was strongly motivated by the long-term MTO findings, which showed that neighborhood environments matter substantially for the long-run educational and economic outcomes for children from low-income families. That motivated a great interest in understanding why low-income families with housing vouchers do not end up moving to affordable, high-opportunity areas, which could improve the health and wellbeing of parents and provide better outcomes for their kids.
The MTO research shows that it is extremely important to provide low-income families opportunities to move to less segregated, higher-opportunity areas. The CMTO study is trying to see if a voluntary program—instead of a mandated program like MTO— with customized service to families for making opportunity moves can help more families move to high-opportunity areas. We got the chance to partner with the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities to conduct the study in the Seattle metro area, where only 10 to 15 percent of low-income families with vouchers were moving to high-opportunity areas. This was similar to what we were seeing on the national level.
How have you seen the policy and research landscapes evolve from the original MTO study to the current day?
It’s been a long and winding road. When we first started MTO, it was motivated in a brief moment in 1992—following the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles—when, for a brief period, Congress became more concerned in segregation, race, and US metro areas, and it passed a bill that generated the money for the MTO demonstration. Early on there was some backlash against the demonstration, especially in the suburban areas around Baltimore, and an intended second round of MTO never got funded.
The short-term and interim MTO results showed promising impacts in improving the health and well-being of adults and of adolescent girls, but no detectable impacts on adult earnings or on the educational outcomes of the older children. We probably lost much interest among policymakers for housing mobility policies because MTO wasn’t quickly improving incomes. But what we learned is that, if you want to see true long-run impacts on kids of changes in neighborhood environments, you have to wait a long enough time for the kids to become adults and to observe their labor market outcomes.
When Raj Chetty, Nathan Hendren, and I were able to link the MTO families to administrative tax records to study long-run economic outcomes 15-20 years after random assignment, we found very large and positive impacts for the younger MTO children—including that children under the age of 13 when their families moved were more likely to attend college and have substantially higher incomes. The long-run findings for younger children completely changed the perspective. Policymakers were interested again, and we’ve now seen bipartisan support to build evidence-based policymaking around housing mobility. Recently, MTO study results informed the federal Housing Voucher Mobility Demonstration Program, which aims to expand mobility programs across the country.
What excites you most about the preliminary findings from the CMTO study?
The CMTO program effects on opportunity moves are huge. We found that housing mobility services offered to program participants increased the share of families who move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods by 40 percentage points. We also saw at least 30 percentage point increases in moves to high-opportunity neighborhoods across different races, family sizes, and household income levels. It also looks like it’s the barriers to making the move, and not a lack of desire to move to high-opportunity areas on the part of the families themselves, that stand in people’s way. The role that CMTO program staff can play in brokering with landlords, while providing emotional and psychological support for families, seems quite impactful.
This customized policy is more expensive compared to, say, simple information provision, but it is very cheap relative to the benefits it produces. For instance, we’re paying an average of $2,600 for CMTO services per family, which is around 1.5% of what we spend on the rent of the voucher over its lifetime. This is very small relative to the forecasted impact on children’s earnings, which we project to increase about $200,000 over the lifetime of a child who moves at a young age and whose family persists in a high-opportunity neighborhood.
How do you hope future results will inform housing policy moving forward?
The results show that families move across a wide range of opportunity neighborhoods— they’re not clustered in one area. It appears that the CMTO program’s approach of providing personalized staff who can negotiate with landlords on behalf of the families can reduce racial and economic segregation in less diversified communities. If these results hold up, our hope is that other housing authorities and non-profits will think about CMTO services as a feasible set of policies to make our existing housing assistance dollars go further toward reducing segregation and improving family outcomes. To be sure, we still need to see whether the CMTO families persist in their now high-opportunity neighborhoods, but the early results among CMTO program participants on neighborhood satisfaction and expectation of staying suggest we are not just pushing families to areas they plan to leave quickly.
What are you most excited about for future research around neighborhood opportunity and housing mobility?
We want to examine the persistence of changes in neighborhood environments for the CMTO families in the treatment and control groups over the next couple years to better understand the efficacy of the policy. We worked with some really high-capacity public housing authorities in Seattle and King County. An important question going forward is whether a broader set of PHAs can have the same success.
We also need to complement housing mobility with place-based strategies to create higher opportunity everywhere. A lot of the research our team is doing now is looking at the impact of place-based policies. This is much tougher to do with an RCT, but for historical, quasi-random, place-based policies, such as empowerment zones and Hope VI housing project revitalizations, we can now link to Census and tax data to follow the original residents of those areas over time and compare their outcomes to the outcomes of residents of similar areas that didn’t receive such policies. This will help us learn about the effectiveness of place-based policies for the intended beneficiaries (the original residents) to complement housing mobility strategies such as CMTO. I think learning about the effectiveness of different place-based strategies is going to be our next exciting area of research.
This is the second post of a two-part blog series on the CMTO study. In the first post, we drilled down into the planning and research management activities that underlie the success of the CMTO project to date, highlighting the role that J-PAL North America and other partners have played on this project.
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Preliminary results from the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) project are fresh off the press, and there’s a lot to be excited about. In this post, we dig deeper into the planning and research management activities that underlie the success of the CMTO project to date, highlighting the role that J-PAL North America and other partners have played on this project. We hope these reflections can provide helpful guidance to researchers and their partners when collaborating on research projects to come.
Housing mobility programs, which help low-income families overcome barriers to moving to higher-opportunity areas, may be a promising strategy for reducing residential segregation and promoting economic mobility, as outlined in a recent paper from J-PAL-affiliated researchers.
The paper summarizes preliminary findings from the ongoing Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) study in Seattle and King County, Washington. To date, researchers have found that the housing mobility services offered to program participants have increased the share of families who move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods by 40 percentage points relative to a rate of 14 percent among families with standard services (a 286 percent increase).
It’s hard to overstate the implications of these results. The findings suggest that barriers to housing choice are a major driver of housing segregation, dispelling the belief among some that low-income families with Housing Choice Vouchers are living in low-opportunity neighborhoods principally because of preferences for living in such neighborhoods. The study results have already attracted interest from local housing practitioners, who are now considering implementing similar programs in their own jurisdictions.
Part of the power of these findings comes from the relative simplicity and rigor of the research methodology used: a randomized evaluation. The project randomly assigned families who applied for a housing voucher to either a mobility services group or a group receiving standard services. As such, any difference in housing outcomes between the two groups can be attributed to the mobility services program.
While randomized evaluations can paint a straightforward picture of a program’s impact, the much more challenging (and often untold) story is in designing and implementing the evaluation itself. Running a randomized evaluation requires a great deal of effort, and as such necessitates having an equal partnership between the implementing partners and the research team, healthy communication among all those involved, careful monitoring of study implementation, and a strong commitment to learning throughout the research process.
Setting expectations for an equal partnership
From its initial conception, CMTO was built from the aligned interests of researchers and housing practitioners. Inspired by research led by J-PAL affiliates Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz (Harvard University, J-PAL) demonstrating that moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods significantly increased the college attendance rate and future earnings of young children, public housing authority officials partnered with a team of researchers to explore how they might be able to act on the results. The results suggested two complementary policy approaches:
- invest in strategies to improve neighborhoods with lower measures of opportunity (place-based initiatives); and
- help families with younger children move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods (mobility-based initiatives)
CMTO is focused on the second of those two approaches: learning if mobility services can help families with vouchers move to areas of higher opportunity. However, the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities are currently working on other place-based initiatives to help invest in neighborhoods with lower measures of opportunity.
The Seattle and King County Housing Authorities were the first housing authorities among the larger CMTO group to take those initial conversations and turn them into an active research project, dedicating significant staff time and resources to developing a randomized evaluation of a new mobility program.
The academic team was also interested in how measuring the impact of a housing mobility program on housing mobility might be able to contribute to the larger academic literature on the drivers of housing segregation. Helping families overcome barriers to housing choice, as through the CMTO services, could produce valuable insight on the degree to which barriers to finding housing in higher-opportunity areas prevent families from exercising true choice.
As such, the study was designed in a way that would answer both important policy questions (whether or not to scale up a new experimental program) and important academic questions (what is driving residential segregation in the US), with the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities and the research team playing equal roles shaping the design of the study.
The CMTO study in Seattle and King County demonstrates the value of centering research partnerships on aligned interests and common understanding. See Assessing viability and building relationships in the J-PAL North America Evaluation Toolkit for additional lessons on building a successful research partnership.
Establishing clearly defined roles
An often-overlooked component of running a research study is the project management activities required to keep a project on track. The CMTO study in Seattle and King County is an incredibly collaborative project, involving stakeholders from Seattle Housing Authority, King County Housing Authority, the research team, the non-profit service provider, J-PAL North America, MDRC, MEF Associates, and Opportunity Insights.
Each partner on the project brings a unique expertise, with perspectives from sociology, Housing Choice Voucher program operations, housing policy, social service provision, microeconomics, communications, program evaluation, and research management represented on the team. Many other research projects involve a similar number of stakeholders, but what has made this project particularly unique has been the degree of communication and coordination across the different partners, which has enabled the team to maximize the contributions of each perspective.
The sheer number of different stakeholders and the many moving parts across different working groups and partner organizations necessitated having a central intermediary who could be tuned into the constraints and needs of each organization. J-PAL North America has filled this role on the Seattle and King County project, with project management led by Kristen Watkins.
Kristen plays a key role in clearly delineating who is responsible for what, who should be consulted for certain kinds of questions, and ensuring that all major project activities are on track according to the project timeline. The project management role also involves a good deal of communicating across stakeholders, and having someone with a foot in both the policy door and the academic door can be helpful for translating between researchers and practitioners.
See Formalize research partnership and establish roles and expectations in the J-PAL North America Evaluation Toolkit for additional lessons on project management of a randomized evaluation.
Implementing and monitoring a research study
When running a randomized evaluation, another key to success is thinking carefully about how to set up the study in a rigorous, ethical, and efficient manner. This often involves navigating programmatic complexities when considering how to embed study enrollment, random assignment, data collection, and monitoring into the normal operations of the program being evaluated.
MDRC has led the research management of this project, working with the Housing Authorities to draft study protocols, build data systems and processes, and inform key decisions for designing the evaluation. MDRC is also carefully monitoring the study to ensure that study enrollment operates smoothly and that all study procedures are adhered to.
See Define intake and consent process and Design and iterate implementation strategy in the J-PAL North America Evaluation Toolkit for additional lessons on implementing a randomized evaluation.
The value of formative and qualitative evaluation
Although preliminary results were only just released this week, learning has been central to CMTO from the initial conception of the program.
In embarking on this project, the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities launched a completely new mobility program. To do so, the team relied heavily on feedback from voucher-holding families, frontline staff, external researchers, landlords, and existing mobility programs from across the country, ensuring that the new program would be designed to fit the needs of families in particularly tight housing markets such as the Seattle metropolitan area. A central part of the formative design phase was running a pilot of the new programs to fine-tune the proposed interventions and test the recruitment and enrollment process for families.
The study is also relatively unique among economics working papers in that it includes qualitative components in its analysis, led by Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins. Professor DeLuca and her team conducted in-depth interviews with a randomly selected sub-sample of 114 families in both the treatment group and control group. The interviews were critically important in adding much-needed context to the “black box” of the quantitative results, helping to explain why the intervention worked, not just if it worked. Overall, the interviews suggested that what made the CMTO program successful was its ability to customize services to the needs and circumstances of each family.
Including qualitative components in a randomized evaluation also helped inform the research design. In February 2019, the CMTO project team drew on some initial interviews with participating families and implementation research, led by MDRC, that collected feedback from the staff who run the program and interact with families. The team then used those learnings to design the second phase of the study, which will test new iterations of the existing services to determine whether different approaches to service delivery will be more or less effective in supporting moves to areas of higher opportunity. Insights from this second phase of the research are critical for identifying policy solutions that are ultimately effective and scalable.
Looking to the future
The Seattle and King County study originated out of a desire to act on the findings of prior research. In turn, the research team and the public housing authorities are now working to act on the findings of this study. For example, the study results stand to inform the roll-out of the federal Housing Voucher Mobility Demonstration Program, which aims to expand mobility programs across the country.
And, of course, the research in Seattle and King County is still ongoing. The next phase of the study was launched in July 2019 and will continue through 2020. Additionally, the project will evaluate whether families persist in their new neighborhoods.
With a shared commitment to collaboration and learning, the team looks forward to how CMTO results can continue to inform and influence the housing mobility landscape in the future.
To learn more about CMTO or partner with us, please visit our project website or contact CMTO project manager Jacob Binder.
This is the first post of a two-part blog series on the CMTO study. In the second post, we sat down with Lawrence Katz—Co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America and one of the authors on the CMTO study—to collect his reflections on the preliminary results, how this study builds upon his previous research, and how these and future results may inform housing policy moving forward.
Neighborhoods matter for the well-being of residents. Moving from lower-opportunity neighborhoods to higher-opportunity neighborhoods has been shown to improve later-life outcomes for children whose families move and may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Motivated by these findings, researchers are partnering with Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) and King County Housing Authority (KCHA) in Washington to evaluate whether mobility services are effective at encouraging families with children to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Preliminary results from the first year of the ongoing study demonstrate that the mobility services significantly increased the share of families who moved to higher-opportunity areas, suggesting that residential segregation is largely driven by barriers to housing choice.
Policy issue
The United States budgeted over $18 billion in 2017 for the Housing Choice Voucher program (commonly referred to as Section 8). The Housing Choice Voucher program, administered by Public Housing Authorities (PHAs), provides eligible low-income families with rental assistance to pay for decent, safe, and sanitary housing in units they select.3 Previous research conducted by J-PAL affiliates Raj Chetty (Harvard), Nathaniel Hendren (Harvard), and Lawrence Katz (Harvard) on the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project, which randomly assigned the offer of housing vouchers to families living in low-opportunity neighborhoods, found that young children (under 13 years of age) who moved to a higher-opportunity neighborhood with the voucher had substantially improved life outcomes nearly two decades later. Young children who moved to an opportunity neighborhood before age 13 earned 31 percent more on average in adulthood and were 32 percent more likely to attend college.4 However, as of 2017 only approximately 15 percent of Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) recipients lived in neighborhoods where fewer than 10 percent of residents were poor.5 There is growing interest in identifying effective strategies to help families move to higher-opportunity areas. There are a variety of hypotheses for why more families with vouchers do not choose to live in high-opportunity neighborhoods, including housing and moving costs, lack of information about high-opportunity neighborhoods, landlord constraints, and discrimination. What are effective strategies to increase families’ ability to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods?
Context of the evaluation
In the Seattle metro area in Washington State, children who grow up in different neighborhoods have substantial differences in life outcomes and economic mobility. Preliminary assessments by the Seattle Housing Authority and the King County Housing Authority have shown that many families with HCVs currently live in low-opportunity neighborhoods.
This evaluation is part of the broader Creating Moves to Opportunity project that aims to better understand how to facilitate moves to higher-opportunity neighborhoods for families with young children. The study is being conducted with approximately 1,300 low-income families who have received HCVs in lotteries through SHA or KCHA.6 To be eligible for the study, families must meet HCV eligibility requirements (including income levels, criminal history, and debt owed to housing authorities) at the relevant PHA and have at least one child under 15 in their household. In this evaluation, higher-opportunity neighborhoods were selected based on the underlying data from the Opportunity Atlas as well as logistical input from the PHAs to ensure sufficient affordable housing stock availability in selected areas and ease of communication about opportunity areas to families.
Details of the intervention
Researchers are evaluating the effectiveness of mobility services that aim to help low-income families with children move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods. Eligible families who participate in the study are randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group.
During the first phase of this evaluation, treatment families have access to all of the services outlined below. Researchers will use preliminary data gathered in the first phase of the project to refine interventions for a second phase where families will be randomly assigned to multiple treatment groups receiving refined interventions and a control group. In both phases, families in the control group have access to standard services provided by their respective PHA.
The mobility services include interventions for both families and landlords that are primarily implemented by a nonprofit contractor. The family-facing services include:
- Rental application coaching to help families prepare to lease, including resolving or preparing families to discuss poor credit or rental histories, and coaching on how to work with landlords;
- Opportunity area education, including information on schools, amenities, and community resources;
- Housing search assistance to support families’ in seeking out rental units, including referrals to units where landlords are interested in leasing to families participating in CMTO; and
- Flexible financial assistance that families can use towards application fees, security deposits, and moving costs.
The landlord-facing services include:
- An expedited lease-up process to minimize administrative delays for landlords who lease properties to families participating in the study in opportunity neighborhoods.
- A damage mitigation fund that provides landlords with up to $2,000 in reimbursement for damages above and beyond the security deposit of units leased by program participants.
- Additional outreach conducted by contractor staff to landlords in opportunity neighborhoods to increase the number of units available to families.
Results and policy lessons
Preliminary results from phase one of the study demonstrate that the mobility services substantially increased the share of families who chose to move to higher-opportunities. Fifty-four percent of families who received the mobility services chose to move to high-opportunity areas, compared to 14 percent of families who received standard services in the control group (a 286 percent increase).
The mobility services did not have any impact on the percentage of families who successfully use their voucher to lease up in a unit. The mobility services therefore changed where families moved, not whether they moved.
On average, there were no differences between families in the treatment and control groups on measures of housing quality such as unit size or age. There was also no difference in families’ distance to their prior location or proximity to jobs. However, the average monthly rent was $186 higher for families in the treatment group compared to the control group. After moving, families in the treatment group were 25 percentage points more likely to report being satisfied with their new neighborhood than those in the control group.
The preliminary results demonstrate that many low-income families live in lower-opportunity areas not because of any preference for such neighborhoods, but rather because of barriers which prevent them from moving to higher-opportunity areas. Qualitative evidence from interviews with a subset of families confirmed that many families would prefer to move to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, but various barriers prevent them from doing so. The interviews suggest that the mobility services were particularly effective due to the program’s ability to customize service according to each family’s specific needs and circumstances.
The researchers suggest that implementing similar housing mobility programs for families with Housing Choice Vouchers across the United States could significantly reduce residential segregation and improve economic mobility.
Chetty, Raj, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence F. Katz. 2016. "The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Experiment." American Economic Review, 106 (4): 855-902.
J-PAL Policy Briefcase. 2015. “Moving to Opportunity.” Cambridge, MA: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Neighborhoods matter for the well-being of residents. Helping families with young children living in high-poverty housing projects to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods improves the later-life outcomes for the children and may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty.
Policy issue
A long history of research has shown that people who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods fare poorly on important life outcomes, such as income, education, health, and criminal involvement. Researchers and policymakers have long been concerned that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood could cause some of the negative outcomes often seen for the residents of these neighborhoods. It has been difficult to determine whether or not this is the case, since most people have some choice of where they live, and differences in outcomes could be caused by many factors in addition to neighborhood environments.
Still, there have been numerous theories about how neighborhoods might cause individual life outcomes. Life in a disadvantaged neighborhood may depress residents’ outcomes by exposing them to stressful conditions or by limiting their access to strong schools or job referrals that lead to opportunity. On the other hand, there are theorized downsides of moving to more affluent neighborhoods: new neighborhoods could be more discriminatory, offer more competition for jobs, and provide fewer social services to poor residents.
Given the large number of people living in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, it is important for policymakers to understand not only the effects of neighborhoods on individuals, but also the reason for those effects. What is the extent of the problem? Which programs might remedy the negative outcomes often experienced by poor individuals?
Context of the evaluation
US residential segregation by income has grown over the past forty years. Nearly nine million people now live in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, where 40 percent or more of the residents are below the poverty line.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) project in 1994 to test the impact of offering housing vouchers to families living in high-poverty neighborhoods. The vouchers were assigned by lottery, allowing researchers to follow randomly selected, equivalent groups of low-income families and attribute group differences in outcomes to the offer of an MTO housing voucher.
Photo credit: Getty Images
Details of the intervention
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) enrolled families in MTO between 1994 and 1998 in five cities: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. To be eligible, families had to have children under age 18 and either live in public housing or live in assisted housing in areas where more than 40 percent of the population was below the federal poverty line. About 77 percent of the enrollees said their primary or secondary reason for moving was “to get away from drugs and gangs.” After enrolling, eligible families were then randomly assigned to one of three groups.
Control group: 1,439 Households
This group continued with the status quo: families continued receiving project-based housing assistance and may have later received housing vouchers through a different assistance program.
Unrestricted Voucher group: 1,346 Households
This group received regular Section 8 housing vouchers that were geographically unrestricted to move to private-sector housing. These families did not receive any mobility counseling from the MTO program.
Low-Poverty Voucher group: 1,819 Households
This group received special Low-Poverty Section 8 housing vouchers that initially could be used only in areas with poverty rates under 10 percent. Families also received mobility counseling. For the first year of the program, families could only use the voucher in a low-poverty neighborhood, but in following years they were able to use their voucher to relocate to any neighborhood. Voucher recipients had to comply with all Section 8 restrictions.
The legislation that authorized MTO was motivated to improve “the long-term housing, employment, and educational achievements of the families assisted under the demonstration program.” The research agenda was expanded to also examine the physical and mental health of the participants. From the first informational sessions to the final publication of results, the entire project spanned about twenty years.
To measure long-term outcomes, researchers sent interviewers from 2008 to 2010 to survey the MTO heads of households and youth (those aged 10–20 during December of 2007). Effective response rates for adults and youth were 90 percent and 89 percent, respectively. Researchers used administrative data from tax returns to follow up on children’s and adults’ long-term outcomes through 2012.
Results and policy lessons
Housing voucher programs resulted in families living in lower-poverty neighborhoods.
Families offered MTO housing vouchers were more likely to move to and continue living in lower-poverty neighborhoods than the control group. Families that were offered the Low-Poverty voucher were significantly more likely to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods than the unrestricted moving group, an effect that persisted in the long term.
New neighborhoods were safer, and movers felt safer and happier.
Families moving with a Low-Poverty voucher experienced about a one-third drop in local violent-crime rates. Families in both MTO voucher groups reported greater subjective well-being (happiness). Moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood improved health. MTO voucher moves had no detectable long-term effect on a self-reported health measure, but MTO moves led to significant improvements on direct measures of physical health. For adults, moving with a Low-Poverty voucher reduced the likelihood of diabetes by half and the rate of extreme obesity by about 40 percent.
Mental health also improved for adults and female children, who were less likely to experience psychological distress (depression and anxiety) in the Low-Poverty voucher group. Families who used the unrestricted moving voucher experienced more modest health gains.
| Understanding the results |
| The reported results primarily indicate the effect of using a voucher to move (the “treatment on treated effect” or TOT), not the effect of simply being offered a voucher (the “intent to treat effect” or ITT). 47.4 percent of families in the Low-Poverty Voucher group used the voucher they were offered. Since about half of the voucher recipients actually moved, one approximately doubles the ITT effect to get the TOT estimate of the effect of moving with a voucher. The TOT estimates are the results presented in this section when describing “families that used the voucher.” |
The effects of moves to lower-poverty neighborhoods on children’s outcomes varied based on the child’s age at the time of the move:
Children who moved before age 13 had increased rates of college attendance and higher incomes later in life.
By their mid-twenties, children who moved with a Low-Poverty voucher before age 13 had incomes that were 31 percent higher than the control group. These children also were less likely to become single parents and more likely to go to college and to live in better neighborhoods as adults. The higher adult incomes of young children in families offered Low-Poverty vouchers yield significantly higher tax payments, which could save the government money in the long term.
Children who were over age 13 at the time of MTO voucher moves had slightly negative long-term impacts, possibly due to disruption effects.
The younger children were when they moved, the more they benefited from the move, suggesting duration of exposure to neighborhood environments is a key determinant in children’s outcomes. Moves to quite different environments themselves may be disruptive to children’s lives. For younger children, the eventual benefits of exposure to better neighborhoods outweighed this disruption, but older children spent less of their childhood in the new neighborhoods. Male youth in particular showed some negative medium-term outcomes after moving to lower-poverty areas.
Adults had no change in education, employment, or income.
There were no detectable short- or long-term impacts of MTO moves on adult economic and educational outcomes for either the Low-Poverty or Unrestricted voucher groups. Both groups also saw no change in receipt of government benefits. Unlike children, adults did not benefit economically from more time spent in the new neighborhoods although they did end up being healthier and happier.
Children who grow up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty fare worse in adulthood than children from more affluent areas.
The Moving to Opportunity experiment sheds light on the extent to which these differences reflect the causal effects of neighborhood environments themselves. The theory behind the MTO project is inherent in the name—that families would move and find greater opportunity in less impoverished neighborhoods. Such a pattern is clear for younger children.
Children whose families moved from poor neighborhoods when they were young have higher incomes, better education, and are less likely to live in poor neighborhoods themselves in adulthood.
In turn, the children of these children (the grandchildren of the original families) will also grow up in better environments and are more likely to be raised by two parents with better education and higher incomes. MTO also conclusively established that neighborhoods can affect the mental and physical health of residents. Adults who moved experienced better mental and physical health, and female youth had large decreases in depression. The conditions of high-poverty neighborhoods contribute to cycles of persistent poverty and drain the physical and mental health of residents.
However, the MTO policy is not an unqualified success. Adults did not see better employment prospects or achieve better educational outcomes. Moving may be disruptive to children.
The older children were when they moved, the less they benefited from moving, consistent with other evidence that shows that the duration of time spent in a better environment is a key determinant of children’s outcomes. MTO moves led to some negative outcomes for male children during adolescence, but the effects turn significantly positive in adulthood for those who moved before age 13.
MTO proves that concentrated poverty is directly and negatively affecting the well-being of the poor, and that moving out of concentrated poverty improves lives.
Targeting subsidized housing vouchers specifically to low-income families with young children may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty and even save the government money, but it is not a comprehensive solution.
MTO started over twenty years ago, but the importance of this issue is only growing.
For the last several decades, residential income segregation has sharply risen in America—Americans are increasingly self-sorting where they live based on income and wealth. If the trend of increasingly concentrated poverty continues, more and more poor children will grow up in neighborhoods that are draining their happiness and health, and giving them fewer opportunities to find success as adults.
For more information about the impact evaluations of Moving to Opportunity, please see:http://www.nber.org/mtopublic/