Over the years, Congress, HUD, housing authorities, advocates, residents and other stakeholders have debated the effectiveness of housing solutions that are people-based (helping families move away from impoverished neighborhoods to neighborhoods with lower poverty concentrations) versus those that are place-based (working to transform neighborhoods on their existing sites (e.g. the HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods programs).
Earlier this month, a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association examining the children whose families participated in the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Program in the late 1990s. A summary of the study is available here. MTO gave some public housing families the option to take housing vouchers and move into neighborhoods with lower-poverty concentrations. Supportive services were provided to adults in the families in connection with the moves. The study found that mental health outcomes for girls whose families moved to these lower-poverty neighborhoods were better than the outcomes for boys. Surprisingly, boys who moved to neighborhoods with lower-poverty concentrations had worse outcomes than those who remained in areas of high poverty concentration. In fact, the boys had increased rates of depression, conduct disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with researchers noting that the boys’ levels of PTSD were comparable to the impact of combat exposure.
This study raises questions as to why the outcomes are different for boys and girls and why boys were negatively affected by these moves. An earlier Urban Institute analysis suggests that girls may have benefitted so much more significantly from the MTO moves because they were removed from neighborhood circumstances in which sexual harassment and pressure was so prevalent that it diminished their confidence and caused female fear. Another earlier study for HUD suggested that boys may have fared badly based in part on gender differences in navigating new social environments and boys being more impacted by distance from father figures and exposure to neighborhood public spaces. Outside of the MTO context, few studies exist that examine the long-term outcomes of people-based versus place-based housing policy choices, but certainly, the MTO studies reaffirm the complex nature of these choices. Hopefully, the MTO studies will assist in the dialogue about these types of policies.
Urban Institute has published a series of reports on MTO. Another study can be accessed here.