False Assumptions About Poverty Dispersal Policies

The notion of the dispersal of poverty was in some ways an argument about the power of place. Some neighborhoods were places lacking social and economic opportunity. The people in such neighborhoods lived in concentrated poverty. If the problem was poverty concentration, then the answer must be dispersal. As Victoria Basolo (this symposium in Cityscape) points out, the policy world came to this answer in the early 1990s with little evidence that dispersal would really reduce poverty for people. At the time, the struggle to understand the causes of poverty was in earnest, as Basolo summarizes, "These arguments concerning the causes of poverty were not merely academic, because the persistence of poverty was a social problem without an effective policy. " Concerns about poor places arose concurrently, especially concerns regarding what to do about dilapidated public housing (National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, 1992). If poverty reduction for people were our only goal, then we could say that, in fact, poverty dispersal policies such as HOPE VI (or Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere), the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration, or even the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP) have not been successful in that arena-most studies show that people involved in these programs do not become more economically secure (see the review by Basolo in this symposium). By definition, however, moving people out of public housing and rebuilding it as mixed-income housing does have a poverty reducing impact on place. Policy success in for poor places has occurred, perhaps, at the expense of policy success for poor people.Nonetheless, policy goals have created and perpetuated a logic model for these programs as reducers of individual and family poverty that rests on four false assumptions that are necessary for success.1. Moving always creates upward mobility and improves neighborhoods.2. People living in poverty make housing decisions in a hierarchical manner that considers neighborhood before other concerns.3. When given a choice, people living in assisted housing will choose to move away from familiar neighborhoods.4. When given a choice, people living in assisted housing will all understand opportunity the same way, behave in the same way, and make "opportunity" moves.The three articles that this commentary addresses tear down the assumptions of this program model. Taken together, the articles suggest that our goals are, at best, misguided and, at worst, negligent.Basolo demonstrates that HCVP moves do not necessarily improve neighborhoods for these families. Although movers nominally did move to places with slightly lower poverty (less than a 1-percent reduction) and did improve the quality of schools for their children, both changes were too minor to indicate noticeable improvements in quality. In short, on average, and controlling for other factors, movers' neighborhoods are no different from those who do not move, movers are no more likely to be employed, and the schools that movers' children attend are no better than those of nonmovers' children. Thus, Basolo concludes, moving did not improve things-or not in any way that we can observe from afar. The already relatively low poverty rates in the areas studied are likely responsible for the lack of neighborhood improvement. The average poverty level in the areas studied was 14.7 percent, much less than the usual 20.0-and-less rate for a low-poverty neighborhood. The study points out that moves are not going to automatically improve neighborhood quality if poverty is already fairly low. In addition, simply moving is not going to overcome the history of racial residential inequality that has produced neighborhood differentials in school quality and employment. These issues are all larger structural issues that are not directly influenced by a move alone. As MTO results suggest, a move with counseling can help move people to what the policy considers better neighborhoods (Briggs, Popkin, & Goering, 2010). …