Struggling to stay out of high-poverty neighborhoods: housing choice and locations in moving to opportunity's first decade

Abstract

Improving locational outcomes emerged as a major policy hope for the nation's largest low-income housing program over the past two decades, but a host of supply and demand-side barriers confront rental voucher users, leading to heated debate over the importance of choice versus constraint. In this context, we examine the Moving to Opportunity experiment's first decade, using a mixed-method approach.

MTO families faced major barriers in tightening markets, yet diverse housing trajectories emerged, reflecting variation in: (a) willingness to trade location – in particular, safety and avoidance of “ghetto” behavior – to get larger, better housing units after initial relocation; (b) the distribution of neighborhood types in different metro areas; and (c) circumstances that produced many involuntary moves. Access to social networks or services “left behind” in poorer neighborhoods seldom drove moving decisions. Numerous moves were brokered by rental agents who provided shortcuts to willing landlords but thereby steered participants to particular neighborhoods.

Keywords:

• low-income housing
• vouchers
• neighborhood
• markets

Acknowledgments

Our study was made possible by generous support from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and a consortium of private, philanthropic foundations, including the Annie E. Casey, Fannie Mae, Rockefeller, Smith Richardson, and William T. Grant Foundations. For helpful feedback, we are grateful to John Goering and Susan Popkin (Co-Principal Investigators on the study), as well as Phillip Clay, Langley Keyes, Barbara Sard, Margery Austin Turner, and anonymous HPD reviewers. We also benefited from the discussions of the Social Science Research Council's Mixed-Income Housing Research Group, of which the first author was a member, which received support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Notes

¹See US HUD (2007). The number assisted in a given month varies according to administrative action and utilization rates, distinct from the number of households “authorized” through annual Congressional appropriations.

²We use “minority” to refer to any group other than white, non-Hispanics.

³See Hanna Rosin, “American Murder Mystery,” The Atlantic (June 2008); Xavier de Souza Briggs, Peter Dreier et al., “Memphis Murder Mystery? No, Just Mistaken Identity,” Posted on Shelterforce Online (July 2008); and Solomon Moore, “As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow,” New York Times (August 8, 2008).

⁴See Leslie Kaufman, “An Uprooted Underclass, Under the Microscope,” New York Times (25 September 2005); “A Voucher for Your Thoughts: Katrina and Public Housing,” The Economist (24 September 2005); Xavier de Souza Briggs and Margery Austin Turner, “Fairness in new New Orleans,” The Boston Globe (5 October 2005); and Briggs (2006). The Katrina relocation also created a “natural experiment,” with moves from segregated, high-poverty, and often high-crime areas in pre-storm New Orleans to a range of different neighborhood contexts in a variety of metro areas.

⁵There is a large literature. See, in particular, Hartung and Henig (1997), Khadduri (2006), Newman and Schnare (1997), McClure (2006), and Turner and Williams (1998).

⁶See Newman and Schnare (1997) and Meeting Our Nation's Housing Needs: Report of the Bipartisan Millennial Housing Commission Appointed by the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC 2002).

⁷Clearly, some types of moves have long been associated with social mobility as well as escape from undesirable places. But as every parent knows, moving can be harmful as well. Recent research on child and adolescent development has underscored the deleterious effects of frequent moving on children and adolescents, net of other factors, including poorer emotional health, weaker academic outcomes, strained family relationships, smaller and less stable peer networks, and even a greater risk of gravitating toward deviant or delinquent peers after arriving in new schools and communities (Barlett 1997; Haynie and South 2005; Haynie, South, and Bose 2006; Pribesh and Downey 1999). Drawing on fieldwork among low-income African-Americans, researchers and family therapists have emphasized the importance of securing “the homeplace” – comprising “individual and family processes that are anchored in a defined physical place and that elicit feelings of empowerment, rootedness, ownership, safety, and renewal” (Burton et al. 2004, 397) – and the difficulty many families face in securing such a homeplace.

⁸Latinos appear to occupy an intermediate position, with more favorable locational trajectories than blacks but less favorable ones than whites (South, Crowder, and Chavez 2005), and also to show substantial variation among nationality groups (e.g., Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican); data limitations have made it impossible to study longitudinal patterns among Asians.

⁹As the researchers note, the finding that those in the most disadvantaged places are less likely to move may reflect negative selection: The fact that households that lease up in those areas face additional, unobserved challenges. In a controlled experiment, Abt Associates et al. (2006) found that voucher-holding welfare families enjoyed some improvement in locational outcomes over time, reflecting both economic and racial integration, when compared to welfare families that did not receive housing vouchers. Families who entered the demonstration while living in “stressful arrangements,” including high-poverty public housing, were particularly likely to experience locational improvements.

¹⁰Most voucher users relocated to predominantly black or racially changing areas of the local market. In addition, more than half of the voucher users in their study reported wanting to move again, and even many who were satisfied with their current housing voiced that wish – citing pressure to move out of public housing quickly and feeling that they had “settled” for a satisfactory unit rather than one that was “just right” for their family (p.153).

¹¹Such placement is the defining feature of the relatively uncommon, small-scale unit-based (as opposed to voucher-based) approaches to housing mobility for low-income families, such as in scattered-site housing programs (Briggs 1997; Hogan 1996; Turner and Williams 1998). It also defines supply-side strategies such as inclusionary zoning and area “fair share” requirements—at least when they include very low income households—and efforts to preserve affordable supply in “better” neighborhoods, such as in the federal Mark to Market reforms for project-based Section 8 housing.

¹²The cooperation rate was calculated by excluding those we could not contact, due to death or invalid address (after all options for updating the address for each hard-to-find household had been exhausted).

¹³All personal names below are pseudonyms, and sublocal places are disguised.

¹⁴Note how inadequate it can be to denote neighborhoods or localities according to poverty rate alone. Some low-poverty areas are home to households with a wide range of incomes and socio-economic status (including the poor, up to some threshold level), while other low-poverty areas, such as affluent suburbs, have almost no diversity on that dimension.

¹⁵Rents were measured in 2005 dollars. See US HUD State of the Cities Data System (SOCDS) at http://socds.huduser.org/index.html [accessed August 2, 2007].

¹⁶We used HUD-designated and provided fair market rent (FMR) geographies to track price trends. These areas are not determined solely by housing market analysis by HUD but by the laws and regulations governing the HCV program.

¹⁷Households not included in this analysis were somewhat more likely to be Hispanic, in the labor force, with a high school/GED, and living in a lower poverty neighborhoods at the time of the interim survey, though differences were generally modest (p < .05, data available).

¹⁸As a final caveat, because the Los Angeles site completed MTO lease up several years after Boston and New York, the intervals between observation points are shorter for Los Angeles. Future research on a longer observation window will mitigate this and other site differences, but all households in our study were observed at least 4 years post random assignment.

¹⁹Families reported reasons for moving for each of their address spells, from original lease-up to the qualitative interview in 2004.

²⁰See the Section Eight Voucher Reform Act (SEVRA), S2684 and HR1851.