Don Siegel
One of the most fascinating social
experiments of the last quarter century has been the government’s Moving to
Opportunity Program (MTO). In a nutshell, the Department of Housing and Human
Development (HUD) ran an experiment during the period 1994-1998 to determine
the effects of living in neighborhood’s varying in prosperity on the economic
fortunes, and the heath and well-being of poor families. Neighborhoods differing
on average income also differ on such things as, quality of housing, social
cohesion, family structure, safety, employment opportunities, prevalence of
parks and playgrounds, school quality, access to healthful foods and health
services, and the presence or absence of such things as gangs, violence, and
drugs. Given the array of factors that differentiate wealthy from poor
communities, a general hypothesis upon which this experiment was based is that
where one lives will largely determine what one becomes.
The way the experiment worked was that from 1994 to 1998 HUD awarded
housing vouchers to 4604 low-income families living in high-poverty
neighborhoods in five cities. Most heads of households in this experiment were
African-American or Hispanic females who had less than a 40% high school
graduation rate. As well, a large percentage indicated that they had signed-up
for the MTO initiative because they wanted to leave gang and drug infested
neighborhoods.
What made this experiment unique was
that families were randomly assigned to one of three groups:
·
Group 1 received a housing voucher, which
restricted them to relocating to a low poverty neighborhood (poverty rates
below 10%).
·
Group 2 received a housing voucher that had no
restrictions on where it could be used.
·
Group 3, which could be thought of as a control
group, just received housing assistance in the projects where they currently
lived.
The ultimate question was what effects, if any, a poor
family experienced if they relocated to a neighborhood inhabited by more
affluent cohorts.
Results
Surprisingly, after 15 years, no economic differences were found for
adults moving to a more affluent community. That is to say, income was
approximately the same whether or not an adult moved to a wealthier community
or stayed in a poorer community. As well, only marginal, but non-significant
differences were found in the physical and mental health of adults who had
relocated. Clearly, the lack of effects on these important variables were not
what HUD had hoped for when they crafted MTO.
However, these findings, or lack of findings, may not tell the
whole story as a somewhat curious measure of self-reported well-being did show
that, despite non-significant results in what might be conceived as more
substantive measures, adults who moved to less distressed neighborhoods perceived
themselves to be happier and better off. While it is always a bit speculative
to quantify psychological states in economic terms, a recent study stated that such
a psychological profile was typical of people earning an additional $13,000.[i] In
a sense then, poorer adults were receiving a real increment in their psychic income from living in a
wealthier neighborhood that was not associated with an increment in their real
income.
This gets even more interesting as another, more recent study,
examined what happened to the children who were part of the various MTO groups
by the time they got to their mid-twenties and older.[ii] Results
showed a clear dosage effect. Children who were less than 13
(average age 8) when they moved to a wealthier neighborhood, who had had 9.8
years, on average, of exposure, earned $3477 more a year than controls, were
more likely to attend college (16% better than controls), attended better
colleges, were also more likely to live in lower-poverty neighborhoods as adults,
and less likely to be single parents themselves. On the other hand, children
who moved to wealthier neighborhoods between the ages of 13-18 (average age
15), were associated with negative effects. By their mid-twenties they actually
earned $967 less per year than controls, and fared poorer than or equal to
controls on other things such as college attendance, college quality, where
they lived as adults, and whether they were single parents themselves as
adults. Consequently, it appears that MTO had different effects depending on
when a child moved. For younger children, the effects were positive. For older
children, they were negative. While explaining such differential effects can
only be speculative, arguments have been made that positive effects for younger
children were a result of exposure to positive experiences over a longer period
during critical developmental years. On the other hand, negative effects for
older children have been attributed to the disruption of social networks that
are critical during the adolescent years.
What does MOT Mean to Programs such as
Project Coach and Community Development?
From a wider perspective, moving to a lower poverty neighborhood, had
consequential long lasting effects on younger children that were transferred, in
turn, to their own children. More so, the effects do not appear to be mediated
by family income, but by a neighborhood’s economic well-being, which, in turn,
has an impact on an array of environmental factors. While the data are clear
that MTO has a powerful effect on changing younger children’s lives, and the
lives of their children, it is not clear on what specific neighborhood factors
were responsible for producing different life trajectories for these children. Seemingly,
if these could be identified and transported across neighborhoods, we might
anticipate better life outcomes for youth growing up poor.
Given that our government is not about to provide housing vouchers
for millions of poor families to relocate to more affluent neighborhoods, it
seems reasonable to ponder how those things that poor families experienced in wealthier
neighborhoods can be replicated in poorer neighborhoods. Clearly, this seems
like a reasonable question to ask, but those of us who do community work every
day know that it is not easily answered. Communities are complex places, and
the term emergent system, seems to
characterize such geographical enclaves.
In short, healthy neighborhoods require many ingredients that interact
in complex ways. In such a system, the sum of interactions is greater than all
of its parts. Furthermore, no one really knows how, or is able, to build the
ideal community from a well-defined blueprint over which they have the capacity
to control inputs and outputs.
Yet, experiments like MTO appears to be telling us that children
are impacted by where they live and grow-up, that effects are cumulative, and
track into adulthood. While clarity does not exist on which factors are most
critical to the neighborhood effect a
simple message may be that many components are part of the mix, and that
neighborhoods that wish to be transformed need to work on anything and
everything. These should include, but not be limited to such things as: (a) physical
aspects, which would comprise the quality and maintenance of housing, parks,
libraries, and other public spaces; (b) the quality of schools, (c) the availability
of medical services; (d) easy access to supermarkets that carry a wide variety
of foods; (e) safety in the streets and on playgrounds; (f) support for businesses
that provide goods, services, and employment; and (g) promoting social cohesion that engages
citizens in community decisions about things that affect their lives.
Within this context, programs such as Project Coach play a
critical role. While not the universal panacea for all the challenges that
distressed neighborhoods face, it is an important ingredient that goes into the
stew of factors that can make a
community more livable. Project Coach on
face value may be viewed as a sport’s program, but by design sports are simply
the medium through which youth are engaged so that they can build: (a) relationships
between young children who get opportunities to play various sports and
adolescents who serve as their coaches and mentors, (b) relationships among
adolescents and their young adult mentors and tutors who help them to meet the
daily challenges of growing up in an underserved community, and (c) lifeskills
and character skills that help youth to achieve the same sorts of things that
the younger children in MTO achieved. Project Coach also provides a means for
bringing children’s parents and other relatives together to observe them in
action, and for parents to participate together with their children in various
activities during monthly community nights.
Surely, Project Coach, or any other program alone, does not
contain the full array of benefits that children obtained from MTO, but it is
the type of ingredient that can be
added into the stew that ultimately
makes a neighborhood a better place to live. Clearly, the MTO voucher program
makes sense, but for the vast majority of families who will never see a voucher
and continue to live in poor neighborhoods, we should continue to offer
residents programs, like Project Coach, that make where they live a bit more
like the places to which MTO families moved.
[i] Ludwig, J., Duncan, G.
J., Gennetian, L. A., Katz, L. F., Kessler, R. C., Kling, J. R., &
Sanbonmatsu, L. (2012). Neighborhood effects on the long-term well-being of
low-income adults. Science, 337, 1505-1510.
[ii] Chetty, R., Hendren,
N., & Katz, L. F. (2015). The effects of exposure to better
neighborhoods on children : New evidence from the moving to opportunity
experiment Cambridge, Mass.
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