Assisted Housing Mobility and the Success of Low-Income Minority
Families:
Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Future Research
[1]
Xavier de Souza Briggs &
Margery Austin Turner
Introduction
In the social policy field, where complex goals and
seemingly intractable problems often make it hard to generate useful answers
about what works, there is an understandable tendency to label demonstration
programs either “successes” or “failures.” In the context of assisted housing mobility
initiatives, such as the court-ordered Gautreaux desegregation program and the
federal Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, the narrow question is: 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 research
demonstrations and policy experimentation more generally.
There are two main reasons for this. First, it is all too easy, particularly where
interventions are complex and end up testing what no one expected, to learn the
wrong lessons from simple success-or-failure diagnoses. Policymaking settings are notorious for
relying on simple stories about cause and effect success and failure, and so
this risk is significant. Second,
success-or-failure dichotomies tend to ignore the real story: Why outcomes are so varied across contexts, client groups, and of course approaches to
implementation. Both Gautreaux and MTO
offer valuable lessons about how to
design and implement effective mobility strategies and under what conditions these strategies are likely to produce
benefits for particular kinds of participants.
Two recent events make a close examination of these
lessons especially timely. First, the
fortieth anniversary of the filing of Gautreaux, a landmark in American housing
and social policy as well as civil rights, provides an invaluable opportunity
to consider these lessons and their implications for ongoing policy development
and practice. So does the massive forced
relocation of families, including many poor African-American families from poor
and segregated neighborhoods, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina last year—a
“displacement” that triggered contentious debates about how to rebuild both
places and lives without recreating severe disadvantage.
[2]
As for the wisdom of mining lessons, consider that Gautreaux “succeeded”
in ways that no one anticipated when it was launched, generating new hypotheses
about the potential role of assisted housing mobility in helping black families
escape poverty (not just live in racially diverse communities). These new ideas were further tested in the
five-metro MTO experiment that was directly inspired by Gautreaux, by other,
non-experimental mobility programs, and, to some extent, by HOPE VI, the
largest-ever federal commitment to replace and revitalize distressed public
housing developments. Considered
together, these efforts represent a second round of experimentation in the
legacy of Gautreaux, a round that is now generating important new results that
offer lessons about how, where, and for whom to pursue the dream of expanding
opportunity through wider housing choice.
This article focuses, then, not on whether Gautreaux, MTO, or HOPE
VI “succeeded” or “failed,” but on what
their results teach us about how to make assisted housing mobility policies
more effective in the future. To a great
extent, these lessons are grounded in a simple logic model for understanding the
strengths and weaknesses of assisted housing mobility as a tool for (a)
improving the quality of life of the poor or (b) helping them escape
poverty. Logic models, also known as
“theories of change,” consist of a set of causes and effects, outlined in a
sequence (or “chain”), to clarify the premises and contingencies on which
success depends.
[3] In our view, the most basic
logic model for assisted housing mobility is this: The target families will want to move to promising locations, given the motivations they
bring and the information about choices that can be offered; they will be able to move (relocate), given
counseling, search assistance, and/or other supports; the families will be able
to stay in new locations long enough
to benefit from relocating, given their own resources and resilience as well as
housing market conditions and post-move supports; the families will be able to take advantage of new locations, given
family resilience and resources plus external supports if available; and there
will be significant net benefits for
participating families (even if specific effects are mixed for subgroups of
movers).
Drawing on
a growing body of rigorous demonstration research, we elaborate on these causes
and effects, as well as the threshold conditions and contingencies. We are particularly concerned that
policymakers, implementers, and researchers alike understand the latter. That is, what must obtain for the potential of
these initiatives to be realized, and where are the initiatives most vulnerable?
Grounded in
our logic model, the body of this article discusses
the following five lessons:
After discussing the evidence for each of these lessons, the article
outlines their implications for the next generation of policy and practice in
the field of assisted housing mobility.
We recommend that future policy address “readiness to move” and explain
its significance, drawing parallels to “readiness to work” in the area of
employment and training policy. We also
recommend targeting places according to tangible measures of access to
opportunity, such as school quality and proximity to skill-appropriate jobs,
rather than proxies such as poverty rate or racial make-up. And we underline the importance of
performance management as a framework to guide implementation, explaining why
assisted housing mobility is particularly vulnerable to the
strong-idea-weakly-implemented trap.
Finally, we recommend strategies to help families stay in better places
and make the most of them, including remedies for housing instability and
more-than-housing strategies (“mobility plus”) that would help address
disabling illnesses, social isolation, lack of childcare and transportation,
low skills, and other barriers to getting ahead—barriers that many participants
in mobility programs face before and
after they relocate.
To clarify our sources, the evidence
presented here is drawn primarily from rigorous research on three mobility
initiatives – interventions that have enabled low-income families to move from
high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhoods:
·
Gautreaux demonstration (non-experimental).
Research has been conducted over
many years (primarily by scholars at Northwestern University) on low-income,
minority families who received special-purpose housing vouchers, under court
order, to move from poor, predominantly black neighborhoods in the city of
Chicago to other city neighborhoods as well as racially integrated suburban
communities.
[5]
·
Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration (randomized experiment). Research
has been conducted by researchers from a number of different institutions on a
carefully controlled experiment to test the impacts of helping low-income
families move from high-poverty assisted housing projects (in Baltimore,
Boston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles) to low-poverty neighborhoods
throughout their metropolitan regions.
Here, we rely not only on earlier qualitative and statistical studies
but on new evidence emerging from qualitative interviews and ethnographic
fieldwork conducted among MTO families in greater Boston, Los Angeles, and New
York.
·
HOPE VI program – research conducted by
the Urban Institute on what is happening to the original residents of five
distressed public housing projects that are being demolished and replaced with
mixed-income housing. Many of the residents moved out and stayed out of their
original (project) neighborhoods, while others returned to enter the
mixed-income developments.
LESSONS
1. Targeting people
The first key lesson from these initiatives, and step one in our logic
model, is that assisted housing mobility is feasible, thanks to family
motivation and support systems of counseling, search assistance, and other aid,
which we know how to deliver more and more effectively. Contrary to the skepticism that the minority
poor strongly prefer to live among “their own,” many low-income families,
including blacks, Hispanics, Asians and whites will volunteer for the
opportunity to move from high poverty areas, typically in inner cities, to
better neighborhoods in the same cities or in the surrounding suburbs. For example, over 5300 families from assisted
housing developments in five cities—about one-fourth of all eligible, assisted
households in those cities—applied to participate in the MTO demonstration,[6] and
during most of the period that the Gautreaux program was underway, the number
of applicants vastly exceeded the available assistance.
[7]
Many, though certainly not all, of those who receive assistance succeed
in using the combination of a voucher and search assistance to find and “lease
up” housing in lower-income and less racially segregated communities. For example, the share of MTO families who
were successful in moving ranged from a low of 34% in Chicago to a high of 61%
in Los Angeles.
[8] Based on surveys, the families most likely to succeed
were those that were more motivated about moving and more optimistic about
their chances of success.
[9] In addition, they tended to own cars and to
have fewer kids.[10] In addition, families with strong social ties
to their neighbors or with a disabled member were less likely to lease up in
the private market, and Hispanic families were less likely than African
Americans to be successful in moving, net of the other factors.
[11]
Mobility counseling and search assistance make a difference, not only in
families’ ability to find a house or apartment, but also in the types of
neighborhoods to which they move.
Families who receive vouchers without mobility assistance are not as
successful in moving to low-poverty neighborhoods. In particular, a recent analysis of voucher
locations in the fifty largest metro areas nationwide illustrates that minority
and central city voucher recipients are not gaining access to the same
opportunities as white and suburban recipients.
[12] Specifically, 25% of African American
recipients and 28% of Hispanic recipients use the vouchers in high-poverty
neighborhoods, compared to only 8% of whites.
[13] In the MTO experiment, some families were
randomly assigned to receive conventional Section 8 vouchers, without any
supplemental housing counseling or search assistance. These families moved to neighborhoods with
significantly higher poverty and crime rates than the families who received
both vouchers and search assistance and who were restricted to using the vouchers
in low poverty areas.[14]
Closely and logically related to the issue of who wants to relocate and
who can is the issue of who benefits
most from relocating. As we explore below with new fieldwork data on MTO, and
while we still have much to learn about this, some of the factors that shape
capacity to move also shape capacity to cope – and ultimately to thrive – in a
new environment. Both theory and empirical evidence
strongly suggest that individual and family characteristics interact with
neighborhood environment in complex ways and play a hugely important role in
shaping social outcomes over time.
[15] Families
with chronic health and mental health problems struggle to make positive
connections with new service providers; they are unable to track down the child
care single parents rely on to find and keep a job; and they may be unable to
take other steps necessary to get by and get ahead. In general, families that start with better
information about school and job choices, who are working or have worked regularly
before, and who show higher levels of optimism and resourcefulness, appear to
be better poised to take advantage of new locations.
[16]
These findings highlight the critical importance of quality counseling –
both in preparation for moving and after the move. But they also raise difficult questions about
screening out the least likely to succeed, about what kinds of families are or
are not well suited to benefit from mobility.
Should scarce assistance resources be targeted to the families who
appear most likely to succeed in moving and in leveraging the opportunities
offered by new neighborhoods? Would
other families perhaps be better served by programs and services that address
their immediate health problems, help them stabilize their lives, and strengthen
their job skills? These programs could
enhance “readiness to move.” Analogous
to readiness to work, which highlights the need for preparatory interventions
before traditional job training and placement, readiness to move highlights the
importance of (a) understanding the heterogeneity of families we may want to
serve with housing mobility programs; and (b) targeting family-level success
conditions in addition to, and perhaps in advance of, conditions tied to
subsidy levels, counseling approaches, location targets, and other features of
programs that have absorbed mobility experts and advocates so far.
Would such a preparatory strategy unfairly deny opportunities available
to otherwise deserving, not to mention highly motivated, families? As researchers continue to monitor the use
and effectiveness of assisted housing mobility programs, we need to learn more
about the family attributes that contribute to success, and to think critically
about the pros and cons of targeting in different ways.
2. Targeting places
A program model centered on moving to better locations naturally poses a
threshold question: What does “better”
mean? Ongoing research highlights the
importance of the criteria used to identify suitable destination neighborhoods
for participating families. The
Gautreaux demonstration – and subsequent court-ordered desegregation remedies –
required minority families to move to majority-white neighborhoods. Families that received special purpose
vouchers and mobility counseling through MTO were required to use their
vouchers in census tracts with poverty rates below 10%.
[17] Nationally, the vast majority of these tracts
are located in majority white, stable, suburban communities. But while many MTO families succeeded in
moving to low-poverty neighborhoods, they differ from Gautreaux families in
that most MTO movers remained in the same central-city jurisdiction and moved
to neighborhoods that were majority minority.
[18] In many cases, these were what urban analysts
call “transitional neighborhoods” that were becoming poorer over the course of
the demonstration.
This set of initial location outcomes may reflect the tendency of MTO
program counselors and the participants themselves to steer toward areas where
landlords were known to accept federal Section 8 vouchers, or it may reflect
the many challenges involved in moving to majority-white communities in the
suburbs. We return to these issues
below, in the discussion of performance targets and careful implementation. But for now, we underline the strong
possibility that MTO’s specific failure to move a large number of families in
the experimental group to more stable, racially diverse neighborhoods in higher
performing suburban school districts may limit benefits for families over the
long term.
Future mobility programs should
rethink the criteria used to define eligible destination neighborhoods as
“opportunity areas.” Both racial
composition and poverty rate are in fact proxies
for attributes that make a neighborhood a good place to live and, more
specifically, a promising place for low-income parents to raise their children.
One possibility would be to target neighborhoods that are far away from
distressed, high-poverty (and majority-minority) neighborhoods, as Gautreaux’s
suburban destinations were.
[19] This would eliminate many neighborhoods that
are in the path of racial or economic transition.
But it would also make it more difficult for participating families,
especially teens, to return to the old neighborhood on a regular basis. This might isolate some families from key
institutional resources (service providers or civic groups) and social
resources (support networks of relatives and friends), as well as from key
risks in the old neighborhood. What families
gain and lose depends very much on where the risks and resources in their lives
were located at the outset.
[20] Contrary to the folk wisdom about cohesive
neighborhoods of poor people, some families who participate in mobility
programs report no support networks at all in their starting-point
neighborhoods; their useful ties were elsewhere. Also, some families had very weak links to
institutions in those neighborhoods. On
the other hand, there is evidence that many families relocated as part of HOPE
VI demolition have lost supportive ties, specifically ties from the projects
left behind, and not replaced them in the first few years after moving.
[21] It is not yet clear to what degree MTO movers
lost social support, or experienced a shift in informal support, based on
relocation distance or other access factors; as noted above, there was no mean
impact on social support for the experimental group as a whole.
[22]
An alternative to the distant-moves approach would be to focus
explicitly on identifying destination neighborhoods that provide access to
specific child-rearing opportunities such as high performing schools or
concentrations of entry-level jobs (which are increasingly suburban). Researchers at the Kirwan Center are
exploring strategies for mapping multiple indicators in order to identify
neighborhoods that are rich with opportunities of different types.
[23] Tracking these indicators over time is
crucial, since the geography of opportunity (and of risk) shifts with
investment and disinvestment across neighborhoods, population migrations, and
other dynamics.
Targeting neighborhoods based on the presence of specific opportunities
will likely produce an array of destination communities that are predominantly
white and lower poverty, even if race and poverty are not explicit selection
factors. Because
of America’s legacy of discrimination and segregation, there are relatively few
predominantly African-American neighborhoods that would qualify as “opportunity
communities”.
[24] But not all white neighborhoods (or all
low-poverty neighborhoods) are necessarily rich in opportunities. Thus, focusing explicitly on the positive
qualities that distressed, inner-city communities lack could significantly
strengthen the performance of assisted housing mobility programs.
In addition to the challenge of defining desirable destination
neighborhoods, important questions remain about the extent to which
participating families must be widely dispersed in their new locations. There are strong arguments against
reconcentrating large numbers of families in just a few housing developments or
census tracts, but there are also benefits to helping people sustain networks
of friendship and support with people who live close by. Some mobility counseling programs ask
successful participants from previous years to host small gatherings of
prospective movers, enabling families to get to know each other and to learn
more about communities to which they might move. Others encourage small numbers of participants to move together to the same building
or subdivision in an opportunity-rich community, so that they feel less lonely
and isolated.
[25] In effect, such mini-enclaves combine the
strengths of “supportive housing” (where families with similar backgrounds
receive multiple services) with the advantages of a healthy neighborhood environment.
[26] In sum, there are several promising
alternatives for targeting place—defining better locations and relocating
families to them—and future policy and research should reflect that fact.
3. Staying there, not just
getting there
Following the logic model we outlined above, many of the benefits of
relocating to so-called opportunity areas hinge on sustained exposure to the
richer resources and lower levels of risk in such places,
[27] as well
as the positive life routines and relationships with service providers—health
providers, schools, and more—that stable housing enables. Yet by the time of
the interim evaluation some four to seven years after initial placements, many
movers in the MTO experimental group had moved again (in some cases more than
once)—and typically to poorer communities.
[28] And nationally, while black families are as
likely as white families to exit poor neighborhoods over time, blacks are much
more likely to fall back into poor areas through subsequent moves.
[29]
This mobility from poor area to poor area,
and from nonpoor ones back to poor ones, is particularly problematic for
low-income renter households, whose mobility has increased in recent decades.
[30]
This evidence, from the most carefully documented experiment in assisted
housing mobility on one hand and from longitudinal national data on American
families and housing markets on the other, underscores the importance of
helping families stay out, not just get out, of risky places. Still, the MTO evidence only sheds light on
the medium term. Long-run evidence,
which comes from administrative data on Gautreaux participants, indicates that
most relocatees to low-poverty, majority-white suburban communities have not
moved back to poor, racially segregated neighborhoods, and furthermore that
initial placement in a racially diverse, low poverty area is a good predictor
of moves to similar areas later on.
[31]
Given that about half of the MTO experimental group did not successfully
lease up at the placement stage, why are so many who did struggling to stay in
lower poverty areas? Is it dislike of
the new areas or feelings of isolation from relatives and friends left
behind? For the most part, no. The major reasons are rent increases and
problems with landlords over problems with the housing unit, factors the Census
Bureau associates with “involuntary” moves.
[32] Though some movers found new neighborhoods
uncomfortable socially, there is no evidence that dissatisfaction with the
initial placement areas was generally a problem—to the contrary, rates of
satisfaction were very high overall—or that movers suffered a loss of social
support or socializing time with relatives or friends.
[33]
These findings suggest, first, that
interventions focused on the involuntary factors would help relocated families
stay in healthier places once they get to them.
Pre-move counseling should seek the best-possible initial placements for
families, not the quickest placements, which may be lowest cost in the near
term and which may reflect the use-it-or-lose-it pressure that confronts
voucher users who face time limits on search.
[34]
Post-move counseling may help resolve some of
the problems with landlords and their units that trigger tenant dissatisfaction
and decisions to move. Efforts to
recruit and retain a broader pool of landlords are also important, since small
pools tend to concentrate voucher-eligible units in a narrow geography and to
relegate tenants, in effect, to a less competitive submarket of landlords. And fostering institutional connections, such
as to faith-based or secular institutions that act as “welcome wagons” is also
promising, as we explore in the next section.
Third, where rent increases in particular
markets are a significant factor, flexibility in the management of the voucher
program (such as granting “exception rents”) can help and is well tested. Also, supply-side strategies, which expand
the supply of rental units that remain affordable over time and often place
units under management by “social landlords” (nonprofits or socially
responsible private firms), are an important structural solution, especially
since many suburbs have little or no history of developing affordable rental
housing. Markets
stratify by income (ability to pay), of course, but the local politics of land
regulation acts, more specifically and directly, to exclude affordable,
entry-level housing development from more opportunity-rich areas, especially in
suburban jurisdictions and more desirable neighborhoods of central cities.
[35]
Khadduri, in the most comprehensive review yet done of the vouchers versus
housing production (demand versus supply-side) policy question, concluded that
supply-side subsidies, while often more costly than vouchers on a
per-family-served basis (at least in terms of fiscal costs), are likely to be
appropriate in several specific contexts:
·
For populations requiring special services,
such as the homeless in transition, the low-income disabled, the elderly in
assisted living settings, and other special-needs groups;
·
Where production subsidies are part of larger,
place-based revitalization (area upgrading) strategies that go beyond housing
to significantly improve services and improve quality of life;
·
Where production subsidies enable residents
of subsidized housing to live in better
neighborhoods; and
·
Where housing markets are tight (and
affordable units scarce) or to preserve affordable housing where neighborhoods
are gentrifying.
[36]
In addition, production strategies are important wherever the supply of
housing is not configured adequately for an area’s families, such as where
larger-unit apartments are not being built to serve larger families with
children. In some instances, as in the
public housing program and certain nonprofit-run subsidized housing
developments, supply-side strategies also help less creditworthy families
improve their credit without losing basic shelter and becoming homeless or
“doubled up” (moving in with friends or relatives who may be struggling too).
In sum, while debates about housing mobility and its lessons have been
dominated by voucher-based or “demand-side” strategies for the past decade or
more—in part because both the Gautreaux and MTO programs were voucher based—we
believe that it is time to address the adequacy of affordable housing supply,
and so-called unit-based mobility strategies,[37] once
again. This is especially important in the tight rental markets that many
strong local economies have become,
[38] and it
was a central conclusion of the most important national policy statement in
recent years, that of the Bipartisan Millennial Housing Commission appointed by
Congress.
[39]
Yet the supply issue, a quiet crisis, remains unaddressed by national
policymakers.
Third and finally, when subsequent moves are a
must for particular families, Chicago’s Housing Opportunity Program (HOP) shows
that second-move counseling can help families stay in lower poverty areas. Rigorous
analysis of location choices among families participating in HOP indicates that
mobility assistance has a measurable impact on neighborhood outcomes over
repeat moves.
[40]
4. Making the most of new neighborhoods
Next in our logic chain, for low-income families who are willing and
able to relocate to healthier neighborhoods, and then able to stay in them
“long enough,” there is the question of making the most of new places—the final
key to realizing significant benefits. While we are still learning much about
how mover families actually make use of new locations, the dominant perceptions
of those who move from high to low poverty neighborhoods are clearly positive.
That is, research to date clearly establishes that assisted housing mobility
yields dramatic improvements in perceived neighborhood quality for
participating families. In this section,
we review the evidence for those perceptions, as well as on benefits realized,
and we describe preliminary evidence on how families’ use of new places varies
by type of family.
In particular, families who successfully move end up in dramatically safer neighborhoods. MTO research finds that moving with an MTO
voucher (to low-poverty neighborhoods) produced a 30.3 percentage point
increase in perceptions of safety.
[41] Families moving with a regular voucher
(generally to intermediate-poverty neighborhoods) also experienced significant
– though smaller – gains in perceived safety, and similarly, eight out of ten
HOPE VI families who moved with vouchers describe their new neighborhood as
safer than their neighborhoods of origin.
[42]
Families place tremendous value on enhanced safety, telling interviewers
what a relief it is not to worry constantly about the threat of violence,
including indiscriminate or “random” violence in ghetto-poor neighborhoods left
behind.
[43] Parents emphasize the freedom to let children
play outside and to come and go from the home, free from fear. For example, MTO participants reported:[44]
It gave me a better
outlook on life, that there is a life outside of that housing . . . Overall I
think I was more happy to be in this area because of my kids and I didn’t want
them to grow up around seeing gangs.
. . . you can wake up every
day and we’re not worried about seeing anybody getting shot and no gang
members, nothing like that and it’s quiet and it’s cool and calm up here. In the city there’s a lot of activities
that’s going on that’s negative. Here
there’s a lot of positive.
I think if I had stayed
in [the projects] I’d be a different person than what I am now. I’d be a wild person; I’d probably be in a
gang or something like that… Since I’ve moved out here, I think I got a better
chance than I do out there.
These improvements in neighborhood environment have the potential to
contribute to significant improvements in the well-being of both adults and
children. Specifically, research on
families participating in the Gautreaux and MTO demonstrations provides
evidence of gains in health, educational success, and employment and
earnings. This section briefly reviews
the findings for each of these important domains.
Adult mental and physical
health.
Among the strongest findings to date from the MTO demonstration are
results showing substantial improvements in the health of women and girls who
moved to lower poverty neighborhoods. In
particular, adult obesity is significantly lower among those who moved, a
noteworthy effect given the national attention now focused on the dangers of
obesity for our long-term health. MTO
parents (who are mostly single mothers) and adolescent girls (ages twelve to
nineteen) also enjoyed significant improvements in mental health, including
reductions in psychological distress and depression, and increasing feelings
of calm and peacefulness.
[45] These gains are statistically significant but
also large in absolute magnitude—on par with mental health gains typical under
the most effective psychotherapeutic treatments available.
Educational success. Gautreaux research found
striking benefits for children whose families moved to low poverty suburban
school districts. They were
substantially more likely to complete high school, take college-track courses,
attend college and enter the work force than children from similar families
who moved to neighborhoods within Chicago.
[46] To date, there is no evidence that MTO moves
have led to better educational outcomes, possibly because so few children are
attending significantly better schools in advantaged school districts or
because it may be too early to detect benefits.
[47]
However, new evidence emerging from in-depth interviews and ethnographic
research is helping us understand these findings more clearly by offering
insights on how parents think about school choices. Some parents are unaware of the school
choices available in their new neighborhoods, in part because most rely on
limited information resources, such as word-of-mouth referrals from similarly
situated relatives or friends. Moreover,
most parents emphasize perceived safety and convenience as indicators of a
“good” school rather than reliable evidence on academic supports (such as small
class sizes, strong counseling, and tutoring) and achievement. These parents placed high priority on
ensuring that their children would be safe at school, even if this meant
staying at the school in the original neighborhood. At least there the dangers were well known
and informal “alliances” had already been negotiated with peers and problem
youth. Finally, some parents think their
kids will benefit more from the stability of staying in the same school – and
the same after-school care arrangements – than from moving to a new and
unfamiliar school. That is, parents
recognized moving per se as disruptive and wanted school to serve as a source
of social and emotional stability in their children’s lives.
[48]
Delinquency and risky
behavior.
Some of the early research on MTO families in individual sites suggested
that young people whose families moved to low-poverty neighborhoods were
engaging in less risky behavior and committing fewer crimes. In Baltimore, for example, moving to a
low-poverty neighborhood was found to cut violent crime arrests among juveniles
roughly in half.
[49] The most recent and comprehensive data from
MTO, however, suggests that moving to a lower-poverty environment is reducing
crime, delinquency, and risky behavior among teen-aged girls but not boys.
[50]
Qualitative research is currently under way to better understand why
boys in the MTO experimental group do not seem to be enjoying the same benefits
from mobility, at least within the same timeframes, and why boys may even
suffer setbacks relative to counterparts in the control group. One possible explanation is that black and
Hispanic boys moving to integrated or predominantly white neighborhoods are
not engaging in any more criminal behavior but are being arrested more due to
racial profiling or higher rates of detecting crime in low poverty areas. Another possibility is that some boys respond
differently to the loneliness, fears, or boredom associated with
relocation: new peers and expectations,
a loss of familiar activities, the felt need to act tough to gain respect,
[51] and
more. Parents also tend to “manage”
(monitor and discipline) boys and girls differently. Finally, MTO results are tricky to interpret
for another reason: because boys and
girls enter into and “age out” of specific risky behaviors—fighting, stealing,
smoking, early sexual activity, and more—at different times, in different ways,
for somewhat different reasons.
[52]
Ongoing qualitative research also helps us better understand gains in
mental health and reductions in risky behavior among adolescent girls. In the distressed and violent communities
from which they moved, many of these girls were sexual targets for older boys
and men. They suffered from sexual
harassment, pressure to have sex, and even rape. Escaping from these environments appears to
offer a tremendous sense of relief and freedom for adolescent girls (and their
parents), not only contributing to short-term gains in health and well-being
but also potentially enabling them to stay in school and postpone child bearing
over the longer-term.
[53]
Employment. The current evidence on how mobility
affects adult employment and earnings is mixed and still somewhat inconclusive.
[54] Over the long term, Gautreaux families that
moved out of segregated and distressed central city neighborhoods achieved
greater employment success than their counterparts who stayed. Specifically, employment rates were higher
among Gautreaux participants who moved to the suburbs than for those who moved
within the city of Chicago.
[55] And recent research using administrative data
on wages and welfare receipt finds that Gautreaux women who moved to predominantly
white neighborhoods with moderate to high resources spent significantly more
time employed and less time on welfare.
[56]
MTO results are not yet as clear, but some suggestive evidence is
beginning to emerge. The interim
evaluation found no significant impacts on employment, earnings, or receipt of
public assistance across the five demonstration sites.
[57] When interim evaluation results are
stratified by site, however, we see significant increases in rates of
employment in Los Angeles and in earnings in New York.
[58] In addition, exploratory analysis of
variations in employment effects for different types of MTO participants yields
suggestive evidence that women under forty may experience employment gains
after the first year.
[59] Nonexperimental analysis also finds that, net
of other factors, MTO adults who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods outside of
the central city earned $55 per week more than those in control neighborhoods,
with those who moved to a suburban neighborhood earning $75 more.
[60]
Here, too, we are using qualitative research methods to examine the
reasons why relocation may contribute to better employment outcomes in some
cities than others, for some categories of families and not others, only in
some types of neighborhoods, etc. Very few
MTO families cited “getting a job” or “being near my job” as their most
important reason for wanting to move; families were primarily motivated to
escape unsafe areas. Furthermore, it is
by no means clear whether most new locations offer better access to jobs –
despite their lower poverty rates and dramatically improved safety. Finally, those not working clearly face
multiple barriers that are not directly affected by location, such as disabling
illnesses, limited skills, and a lack of reliable childcare or transportation.
Use of new places. The initial evidence from in-depth qualitative interviews and
ethnographic fieldwork on MTO families in greater Boston, Los Angeles, and New
York suggests that mover families’ use of new places varies according to the
structure of their social relations, specific family needs that may or may not
be met near the home, the nature of access to other places that are significant
in their lives, and levels of trust toward new neighbors.
[61] Movers may remain quite isolated from new
social ties, local service providers, and other institutions. For some movers,
new neighborhoods are, at least for significant periods of time, residential
locations rather than important social worlds.
For example, for a Latino family in the Los Angeles experimental group,
life revolves around church, the private school run by church, and a
socializing with relatives and friends who live throughout Southern
California. Neither the “old” (housing
project) neighborhood nor the new one is a world of social influences; the new
one is a convenient location with affordable homes, pleasant neighbors (casual
ties at best), and a few playmates for the children.
Summary. Although the research literature provides strong evidence that
neighborhood conditions have an important influence on people’s lives, they are
obviously not the only and probably not the main source of influence.
[62] Some families and individuals can withstand
the disadvantages of even the most distressed environment -- for example by
“bounding” (isolating) family members from neighborhood risks and “bridging” to
resources outside the neighborhood
[63] --
while other families are likely to encounter serious problems regardless of the
neighborhoods in which they live.
Likewise, the MTO evidence is that some domains (health, mental health)
register significant benefits while others (employment, education) may not, or
not everywhere, depending on the specifics of relocation outcomes and family
choices over time. Girls may benefit more than boys; some boys may even
experience risky setbacks, at least for a time, after relocating to lower
poverty areas. Though enhanced safety is
a boon to families whether or not they take specific steps to make best use of
new places, other benefits depend on family agency and resourcefulness. The evidence is that some families are both
more willing and more able to make useful connections (to service providers,
neighbors, or others) after they move.
And starting points—a family’s initial strengths and vulnerabilities—matter,
for straightforward reasons. If a poorly
treated chronic illness, for example, undermines a family’s capacity to make
the most of a new place, or leads to even deeper isolation thanks to the
disruption associated with moving per se, then the aggregate benefits of
assisted housing mobility programs will unavoidably be a function, at least in
part, of who is targeted for assistance, as we argued above.
5. Low risk, untapped
potential
In the context of complexity—that of the programs and of family’s lives
as well—it would be easy to miss one of the more striking features of assisted
housing mobility initiatives: They are tiny, given the demand and promising
results. A final, broad lesson therefore
is that these efforts represent significant untapped potential relative to the
risk they pose to clients and communities.
[64]
Consider location patterns for the federal rental voucher program on
which the best-studied assisted mobility efforts are based. As we noted above, minority voucher holders
are especially likely to use their vouchers in racially segregated central-city
neighborhoods with high poverty rates, despite the availability of units at
affordable rents in many low poverty neighborhoods, including those in suburban
areas. HUD research on the location of
Housing Choice Voucher households in the nation’s fifty largest metropolitan
areas finds that the stock of rental housing in which vouchers can potentially
be used is widely dispersed.
[65] Specifically, within the fifty largest metro
areas, the voucher program utilizes only about 2% of all occupied housing units
and 6% of all rental units with rents below the applicable Fair Market Rents
defined by HUD.
[66] Virtually all census tracts contain at least
some units below that threshold, and 83% have at least some voucher recipients
living in them. Nationwide, vouchers are
generally not clustered geographically: In 90% of all tracts with any voucher
recipients, the program accounts for less than 5% of all households.
[67] But where vouchers are clustered, the clustering
is in high-poverty, mostly minority central-city neighborhoods.
[68]
Thirty years since inception, and
particularly with regard to minority clients, the federal voucher program falls
far short of the policy vision of “a decent home and suitable living
environment” for every American family, a vision enshrined in the Housing Act
of 1949.
The main reasons for this untapped potential are persistent barriers: voucher holders’ lack of information and capacity to search more widely for housing, social stigmas held by landlords and community gatekeepers, oppositional politics, discrimination that is increasingly difficult to detect, and numerous bureaucratic impediments. In this section, we briefly review the state of our knowledge about these important barriers and how they might be overcome, the nature of risks posed by these initiatives, a