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Just Released: Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration: Interim Impact Evaluation

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The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program has provided
thousands of poor adults and children with an opportunity
to use HUD Section 8 vouchers to move out of public or
project-based assisted housing in very poor areas and
into private-market rental housing in areas with much
lower poverty rates.

MTO's unique approach combined the provision of housing
assistance with a rigorous research design that allowed
researchers to answer questions about what happens when
very poor families have the chance to move out of
subsidized housing in the poorest neighborhoods of five
very large American cities.

A new study entitled "Moving to Opportunity for Fair
Housing Demonstration: Interim Impact Evaluation" reports
interim results at about the midpoint of this major
federal initiative. A final impact evaluation will be
conducted approximately a decade after the end of program
operations.

Designed as a demonstration program, MTO was based, in
part, on a growing body of social science literature
which suggests that living in communities with high
poverty concentrations has a variety of detrimental
effects on the residents' current well-being and future
opportunities. The harmful effects of high-poverty areas
are thought to be especially severe for children whose
behavior and prospects may be particularly susceptible to
a number of neighborhood characteristics, such as peer
group influences, school quality, and the availability of
supervised after-school activities. This study, however,
focused on the effects that low-income neighborhoods can
have on individuals and families.

The demonstration sites were Baltimore, Boston, Chicago,
Los Angeles, and New York City. Housing authorities
worked with local counseling agencies to recruit 4,600
very-low-income families for MTO between 1994 and 1998.
Each family in the MTO was randomly assigned to one of
three groups:

o The experimental group was offered housing vouchers
that could only be used in low-poverty neighborhoods
(where less than 10 percent of the population was poor).
Local counseling agencies helped the experimental group
members to find and lease units in qualifying
neighborhoods.

o The Section 8 group was offered vouchers according to
the regular rules and services of the Section 8 program
at that time, with no geographical restriction and no
special assistance.


o Control group members were not offered vouchers, but
continued to live in public housing or receive other
project-based housing assistance.

The interim evaluation has two major components, one
using qualitative methods and the other using
quantitative methods, to assess Moving To Opportunity's
effects in six study domains:

1. Mobility, housing, and neighborhood;
2. Adult and child physical and mental health;
3. Child educational achievement;
4. Youth delinquency and risky behavior;
5. Adult and youth employment and earnings; and
6. Household income and public assistance receipt.

In the short- and middle-term (between 1 and 5 years
after participation in the demonstration), some of the
effects seen by the researchers include improved housing
and residential environments, improvements in adult and
child health, and mixed effects on youth delinquency and
risky behavior. In the longer term, there is some
evidence that the MTO program has had small impacts on
children's education, no effects on employment or
earnings, and no impacts on receipt of public assistance.

One policy lesson of the demonstration is that the
poverty rate may be an overly simplistic way to
characterize a neighborhood, and the researchers suggest
that addressing all the characteristics of the
neighborhood is important for improving the environment
for poor families.

"Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration:
Interim Impact Evaluation" is available on the web at
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/fairhsg/mtoFinal.html
or in printed form for a nominal charge by calling HUD
USER at 1-800-245-2691.

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HUD USER
P.O. Box 23268
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1-800-245-2691
1-800-927-7589 (TDD)
202-708-9981 (fax)
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