The Impacts of New Neighborhoods on Poor Families: Evaluating the Policy Implications of the Moving to Opportunity Demonstration. (Session 3: The Impact of Housing on People and Places)

1. INTRODUCTION The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration, or MTO, is a large, federally funded social experiment designed to test whether improved neighborhood opportunities may significantly affect the life chances of low-income public housing residents. This paper provides the first systematic overview of the design of the MTO and describes its key features. The paper also offers the first cross-site analysis of research findings and explores the MTO's relevance to social science research concerning housing and neighborhood effects. We begin with the social science background to MTO and discuss the purposes of the demonstration. We then describe the key features of the demonstration and how its experimental design addresses methodological issues that have long limited neighborhood effects research. The implementation of the demonstration and how that implementation shapes and limits the research is discussed next, followed by a description of the major research results from a number of MTO studies. We conclude with a discussion of future research needs and policy issues. 1.1 Research Background Research over the last decade has shown that poverty in the United States has become increasingly concentrated in "high-poverty" neighborhoods, and that such concentrations appear to have a range of detrimental effects on the well-being and future opportunities of residents of those areas (Jargowsky 1997; Wilson 1987, 1996; Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, Klebanov, and Saland 1993; Aneshensel and Sucoff 1996; Sampson 2000; Morenoff, Sampson, and Raudenbush 2001; Catsambis and Beveridge 2001). The harmful effects of high-poverty areas are thought to be especially severe for children; their behavior, choices, and prospects may be particularly susceptible to neighborhood-based events and characteristics, such as peer group influence, school quality, and the level of violent crime (Galster and Killen 1995; Ellen and Turner 1997; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn 2001). Social scientists have also focused recently on the possible theoretical causes of both the positive and negative effects of neighborhoods (Manski 1993, 2000; Galster and Killen 1995; Galster, Quercia, and Cortes 2000; Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn forthcoming). The core question is whether there are clear, independent effects from a neighborhood. If so, then social science must next attempt to identify the causes and processes through which such effects appear in the lives of children, adolescents, or adults. While there has long been social science evidence of the harmful effects of living in concentrated-poverty neighborhoods, evidente and discussion about how neighborhood environments may exert positive influences on behavior and life chances are more recent (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon-Rowley 2002). Galster and Killen (1995) have noted the complexity of the causal influences linking metropolitan and neighborhood based opportunities; they point out the dynamic nature of opportunities, and the critical issue of residents' willingness and ability to take advantage of contextually positioned resources. Ellen and Turner's (1997) summary of the literature in this area suggests various mechanisms by which middle-class (often predominantly white) neighborhoods shape, of reshape, the lives of residents. The effects of neighborhood appear to be more pronounced for children rather than for adults. Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn (2001) offer evidence that neighborhood influences on achievement measures--such as IQ--are most important below five years of age. Despite considerable progress over the last decade, researchers have only a limited understanding of which neighborhood effects are most likely to appear first, in what types of households or family members they may appear, under what circumstances, and with what durability of persistence. …