Brief #8 from the series "Metropolitan Housing and Communities: A Roof Over Their Heads"
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
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Both research and intuition support the idea that neighborhoods matter, especially for children (Ellen and Turner 1997; Brooks-Gunn et al. 1997). The neighborhood a family lives in is likely to influence where a child attends school, his or her peer group, and the family's exposure to violence or drugs. For many poor families, moving from a bad neighborhood to a good one may be the first step toward self-sufficiency and wider opportunities. However, the policy prescription for helping families access better neighborhoods is less clear.
There is evidence that the Housing Choice Voucher Program helps families move to better neighborhoods and that households with housing vouchers are more likely to live in lower-poverty neighborhoods than other low-income renters (Goering, Stebbins, and Siewert 1995; Turner 1998). With vouchers, families rent units from private-market landlords. Program participants pay about 30-40 percent of their monthly income toward their rental and utility costs and the federal government makes up the difference. In principle, voucher holders have a wide range of choices when deciding where to live. Voucher holders can move to any jurisdiction in the United States with an authority that administers a voucher program (there are over 2,500 housing agencies nationwide).
While program regulations allow for choice in where to live, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Finding a unit to rent with a voucher, particularly a unit in a low-poverty neighborhood, relies primarily on the household's capacity to navigate the private rental market, and considerable evidence shows that voucher holders face numerous barriers. Landlords are apprehensive about participating in the voucher program. This reluctance is especially problematic
in tight rental markets where landlords can more easily find private-market tenants to rent their units (Cunningham, Sylvester, and Turner 2000; Fosburg, Popkin, and Locke 1996; Lenz and Coles 1999). Further, voucher holders may face racial discrimination and discrimination against families with children in the rental market (Turner et al. 2002; Popkin and Cunningham 1999). Finally, households may limit their search to neighborhoods they are familiar with or where landlords are more likely to accept vouchers. As a result of all these factors, many voucher holders live in economically and racially segregated neighborhoods; this is particularly true for black and Hispanic households (Devine et al. 2003).
During the past 10 years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has introduced policies and programs specifically to "deconcentrate" households that receive housing subsidies. One program focus is to encourage voucher holders to move to low-poverty neighborhoods by providing
housing search assistance and connecting voucher holders with landlords in low-poverty neighborhoods. These programs are collectively called mobility programs.1
The first mobility program was the result of litigation to remedy racial discrimination and segregation by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and HUD. The landmark case—Gautreaux vs. Chicago Housing Authority and HUD—mandated that the Chicago Housing Authority provide
vouchers to public housing residents who wanted to move to neighborhoods where no more than 30 percent of the residents were African American.2 The results from this program were encouraging. Children whose families moved to low-poverty neighborhoods in the suburbs were less likely to drop out of high school, had greater chances of being on a college track, and were more likely to attend college (Rosenbaum 1991, 1995). Soon a small number of mobility programs cropped up around the country. Many were the result of litigation, although some housing agencies initiated small-scale voluntary programs with the help of federal government funds.3
In 1994, HUD launched the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration to specifically address the question of neighborhood effects.4 So far, MTO research has shown that families living in lower-poverty neighborhoods are more likely to report higher-quality housing, lower exposure to violence, and improvements in mental health. Researchers hypothesize that improvement in employment and self-sufficiency will become more apparent over time (Orr et al. 2003).
The body of evidence that moving to low-poverty neighborhoods can produce positive outcomes for low-income families is growing, yet the question of how to encourage or orchestrate moves to low-poverty neighborhoods remains largely untested. Put simply, we know that helping families move to a better neighborhood can improve their access to opportunities, but we do not have strong evidence on how to encourage these moves. No systematic research exists that tests the success of mobility programs in assisting families move to low-poverty neighborhoods.5 Further, we know little about how programs operate, what makes them effective, and which components need strengthening.6
Key Questions
This brief examines the efficacy of providing mobility assistance to families with vouchers by examining the Housing Opportunity Program (HOP) in Chicago. We analyzed program data to answer three questions:
- Does enrollment in HOP increase the probability that a household will move to a low-poverty neighborhood?
- Do voucher holders make incremental moves to lower-poverty neighborhoods over the course of their participation in the program?7
- What other factors (such as household size, income, employment, etc.) affect the probability that a household will move to a low-poverty neighborhood?
To answer these questions, we analyze administrative program data using descriptive and multivariate analysis techniques (for more on methods, see page 11). The rest of this section describes HOP and the local context it operates in and then highlights our key findings.
Notes from this section
1. See Turner and Williams (1998) for an overview of mobility programs operating across the country.
2. In Gautreaux, the courts found that the CHA and HUD had discriminated against black public housing residents, concentrating them in large-scale developments located in poor black neighborhoods. The decision against the CHA in 1969 called for the creation of new public housing at scattered sites in nonminority communities. The case against HUD eventually moved to the Supreme Court and was settled in 1976 (Rubinowitz and Rosenbaum 2000).
3. In 1996, HUD introduced the Regional Opportunity Counseling (ROC) Program, which granted the funding for 16 metro regions to provide mobility counseling to voucher holders (Turner 1998).
4. For this demonstration program, families that volunteered to move out of public housing were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) experimental group (this group was required to move to neighborhoods that were less than 10 percent poor with their Section 8 vouchers and were provided housing search assistance to help them do so); (2) Section 8 control group (this
group was allowed to move with their vouchers to whatever neighborhood they wanted); and (3) in-place control group (this group was not given Section 8 vouchers and remained in public housing
or moved on their own).
5. What we know about how MTO and Gautreaux operated is limited to success rates for leasing up, but not success in moving to low-poverty neighborhoods. All participants were required to move to low-poverty neighborhoods to be counted eligible for the voucher.
6. The only study to date on counseling programs is a report on the initial counseling provided to MTO participants (Feins et al. 1997).
7. The idea behind "incremental moves" is that each time a voucher holder moves to a new unit, he or she will move to a lower-poverty neighborhood.
Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).
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