Effects of housing vouchers on the long-term exposure to neighbourhood opportunity among low-income families: the moving to opportunity experiment

Abstract

Tenant-based rental assistance has received much attention as a tool to ameliorate American poverty and income segregation. We examined whether a tenant-based voucher program improves long-term exposure to neighbourhood opportunity overall and across multiple domains—social/economic, educational, and health/environmental—among low-income families with children. We used data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment (1994–2010) with a 10- to 15-year follow-up period and used an innovative and multidimensional measure of neighbourhood opportunities for children. Compared with controls in public housing, MTO voucher recipients experienced improvement in neighbourhood opportunity overall and across domains during the entire study period, with a larger treatment effect for families in the MTO voucher group who received supplementary housing counselling, than the Section 8 voucher group. Our results also suggests that effects of housing vouchers on neighbourhood opportunity may not be uniform across subgroups. Results from model-based recursive partitioning for neighbourhood opportunity identified several potential effect modifiers for housing vouchers, including study sites, health and developmental problems of household members, and having vehicle access.

Keywords:

• Housing vouchers
• moving to opportunity
• neighbourhood opportunity
• Child Opportunity Index
• heterogeneous treatment effect
• model-based recursive partitioning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Brandeis has engaged in a process over the past 20 years, to increase transparency and simplicity for these indicators and the index overall, for public use (Acevedo-Garcia et al., 2020). It has received funding to update the index into the future, we anticipate it will be a resource that the public will be able to use for years to come, including to evaluate housing programs on relevant outcomes for families.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grant R01HD090014, PI Theresa Osypuk, and National Institute on Child Health and Human Development grant P2CHD041023, PI John Robert Warren. S.