You gotta move: advancing the debate on the record of dispersal

Abstract

This paper summarizes the social science research on the record of housing dispersal programs since 1995. The research shows a consistently disappointing record of benefits to low-income households. Households moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods, voluntarily and involuntarily, show few or no beneficial effects in terms of economic self-sufficiency, health benefits, or social integration. The benefits of dispersal are confined to feelings of greater safety and satisfaction with neighborhood environmental conditions. We offer a framework for understanding the disappointing record of dispersal, highlighting its translation from social science diagnosis to policy, problems in the policy's implementation, its underlying theory of poverty, and the political context within which dispersal has been applied.

Keywords:

• housing
• dispersal
• relocation
• mobility

Notes

¹This argument is especially important to a group closely related to dispersal advocates, the New Regionalists, because it gets at the very dynamic of spatial inequalities that they are centrally addressing. Note, that community decline of the sort triggered by concentrations of poverty is not inherently a regionalist argument. It is made into one by the New Regionalists who argue that there is a shared responsibility for these communities, that there is an unfair playing field that tilts problems toward the central cities while facilitating the flight of capital and middle class families out into suburban jurisdictions that are legally distinct and therefore shielded from the responsibility of addressing the poverty concerns of the region.