Moving to Opportunity | Results from a 15 year social experiment

[mo matik]

The Neighborhood Effect
By Marc Parry

The "What's it like living in the suburbs?" thread reminded me of this great article. It's a long read on urban sociology. Long, but really gives a good picture of where the entire field is right now and how it got to this point.

I'll just quote up some of the parts scattered throughout the article pertaining to the moving to opportunity experiment, but the whole thing is worth reading. The study seeks to understand how much of an impact living in impoverished neighborhoods can have on these people.

The Moving to Opportunity experiment:

The program included more than 4,600 mostly black and Latino single mothers, all from high-poverty areas. Each was assigned to one of three groups. An "experimental" group got vouchers that could be used only in low-poverty areas. The second group got unrestricted vouchers. The third group got no vouchers. By comparing randomly chosen groups with the same backgrounds, Wilson says, the studies "effectively removed individual self-selection as an explanation of the findings."

Results of the study:

Families that moved to safer and better-off areas "improved their health in ways that were quite profound," including reductions in obesity and diabetes, says Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who is principal investigator of the project's long-run study. They showed less depression, Katz says, and "very large increases in happiness." Yet the program failed to improve other key measures, like the earnings and employment rate of adults and the educational achievement of children.

For Jacqueline, the program was a godsend. She moved to a mixed-race, mixed-income residential area in northeast Baltimore, says Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at the Johns Hopkins University who interviewed her for a follow-up study in 2003. Jacqueline, a college dropout who worked as a crossing guard, now rented a single-family home surrounded by yards and in a safe area. To her surprise—she hadn't anticipated this aspect of her new neighborhood—the move enabled her daughter to attend one of the city's best schools. The child's asthma also improved.

Looking back, Jacqueline told DeLuca that her daughter "would be lost" without the program.

"What do you mean?" DeLuca asked, according to a transcript.

"With children with special needs, it's very important to live in an area where you have access to those particular things," Jacqueline said. "If I hadn't been in the program, I don't think she would have gotten that. And it makes me feel good that I can come home from work and come in a nice neighborhood and not see drug addicts on the corner, and hollering and screaming and cursing and all that. You know, bring my child up in a decent neighborhood."

Debate over results and "the bottom line":

Yet despite Jacqueline's positive experience, key findings disappointed social scientists, "who had hoped that the experiment would lead to new ways of combating poverty," according to The New York Times. The program "was designed to get people out of poor neighborhoods and to improve their job opportunities," Jencks tells me, but it did not raise either employment rates or educational attainment. The mixed results, notes Wilson, have driven some "to question whether there really are enduring negative effects of living in poor, segregated neighborhoods."

Researchers have published a stack of papers debating why the program didn't do more and how good a test of neighborhood effects it really was.

The bottom line, for Katz, is that "neighborhoods profoundly matter." The Harvard economist, principal investigator of the program's long-term study, says "the difference between living in a very poor neighborhood and a moderately middle-class neighborhood is as large as doubling your income in terms of happiness and well-being."

Yet moving out "doesn't solve the problem that there's low demand for people who don't have a college degree," Katz says. "Just because you live in a better neighborhood that's safer doesn't mean you're that much more attractive to employers."

 

[mo matik]

bumping my failed thread

 

[gottabeem21]

i only read your highlights right now but i'll check the rest out later.

interesting that the program didn't change the educational achievements of the children in the study.