Intervening in the residential mobility process: Neighborhood outcomes for low-income populations

doi:10.1073/pnas.0507308102

Intervening in the residential mobility process: Neighborhood outcomes for low-income populations

William A. V. Clark*

Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095

Contributed by William A. V. Clark, August 30, 2005

Abstract

Neighborhoods have become the focus of questions about how they affect the families that live within them. A current working assumption of some federal policies is that, with help, households can escape poverty neighborhoods and change their spatial context. How true is this, especially for low-income households, and does changing neighborhoods have measurable benefits? The study uses data from the Moving to Opportunity program, initiated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to test whether policy interventions by means of housing vouchers have aided moves away from low-poverty areas and into integrated residential settings. By examining the neighborhood demography of the initial and subsequent locations of the samples, it is possible to assess the success of the objectives of decreasing poverty and increasing integration. Although the program has shown some success in assisting households to live in lower-poverty neighborhoods, the findings here emphasize just how difficult it is to intervene in dynamic processes such as housing choice and mobility to create policy outcomes.

Footnotes

↵ * E-mail: wclark{at}geog.ucla.edu.
Author contributions: W.A.C. designed and performed research and wrote the paper.
Abbreviations: MTO, Moving to Opportunity; HUD, Department of Housing and Urban Development.
↵ † On the one hand, several studies (15–17) emphasize the impact of macroeconomic structural changes that have taken jobs away from the inner city and thus disadvantaged inner-city minority residents. On the other hand, there are studies that argue that the concentrations of poverty are the outcomes of historic patterns of discrimination, including the intentional citing of public housing in inner-city areas (18).
↵ ‡ Nationally, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has funded ≈1.26 million public housing units, 1.4 million units in assisted housing programs, and 1.5 million households in the Housing Voucher Program (4).
↵ § The reports also have tended to aggregate data across the five cities rather than examining individual metropolitan outcomes.
↵ ¶ “Lease up” is the terminology to describe the process of successfully using the housing voucher to rent a housing unit and move. The program was initiated and the sample selected in the period 1994–1997. To reiterate, there are three groups in the study: experimental movers who are given a housing voucher and special counseling, regular Section 8 movers who are given a housing voucher, and the baseline or control group who are not provided with assistance.
↵ ∥ An interim analysis of the total MTO program suggested that MTO movers were staying in their new communities (30).
↵ ** The data on actual origins and destinations of the moves were not made available for this analysis.