 |
|
Moving from Public to Private Housing
"Moving to Opportunities for Fair Housing" is a large-scale experiment to move some 2,600 low-income families out of public housing into private dwellings in less-impoverished neighborhoods in and outside the central city. The experiment grows out of Chicago's well-known Gautreaux project in which families living in that city's notorious public housing received subsidies to resettle in the suburbs or in revitalized urban neighborhoods. The results were significant: mothers in families who moved to the suburbs were much more likely to have a job than mothers who stayed in the city and children of the suburban movers had a much better change of finishing high school.
In the larger demonstration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has designed a rigorous experiment in which public housing families in five cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York) are divided into three randomly assigned groups in order to identify the factors most important in breaking the cycle of poverty. Those in the experimental group will receive rental vouchers to move to private housing along with counseling assistance. There will be two control groups, one that receives vouchers but no special counseling and the other consisting of families who do not move at all.
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Phillip Thompson of Columbia University believe the HUD demonstration represents an unprecedented opportunity to study how moving out of a high-poverty neighborhood affects families and children. They received a Foundation grant to expand an evaluation they are conducting for HUD to cover all "Moving to Opportunities" participants in New York City, a total of 450 families and 800 children. They will focus on how the locational change affects the children, especially their performance in school, development of literacy and verbal skills, and susceptibility to behavioral problems. They will report the results of their investigation in journal articles.