Moving to Opportunity Twelve Years Later
The excellent Jon Hilsenrath and Rafael Gerena-Morales have an article http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116727318376761110-email.html about the Clinton-era "Moving to Opportunity" pilot program. And, coincidentally, a correspondent asks me this evening if it is indeed the case that high relative poverty among African-Americans today is principally due to residential segregation, and whether residential segregation is in turn principally due to African-Americans' preference to live near other African-Americans.
There are certainly other powerful causes of residential segregation. You can see some of them at work in this gem from the 1994 Wall Street Journal about "Moving to Opportunity" that I have filed away:
"Clinton's Wrecking Ball for the Suburbs": By James Bovard: 4 August 1994: Pamela Price was delighted when she found she could use her new government housing voucher to move into a luxurious apartment complex with a heated swimming pool, four spas, six tennis courts and two air-conditioned racquetball courts.... Ms. Price is the beneficiary of a federal housing policy called "income integration" -- which consists largely of moving welfare recipients into affluent neighborhoods, theoretically to improve their prospects of leading safe and productive lives. But these Section 8 vouchers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development end up sowing chaos in suburban neighborhoods, rewarding dependence on the state and alienating middle class Americans who end up paying for recipients to live in apartments that they themselves could not afford. Amazingly, Congress is on the verge of passing a $60 billion housing act that will greatly expand this program....
At Manhattan Plaza in New York City, Section 8 pays for apartments with wood parquet floors and on-premise swimming, racquet and tennis facilities.... Section 8 certificates were used to entitle welfare families to move into an apartment complex in Silver Spring, Md., that includes a heated pool with water jets, microwave ovens and "deluxe modern kitchens with convenient breakfast bars."... HUD raised Section 8 subsidy levels in Plano, Texas, to $684 for a two-bedroom and $900 for a three-bedroom apartment.... [T]he median rent in Plano, Texas, is only $586 a month....
The unfairness of this hasn't gone unnoticed... outraged private citizens.... Nevertheless, Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros is expanding the Section 8 program.... The flood of former public housing residents has turned parts of some nearby towns into a "Section 8 corridor." Officials in Pacesetter, Ill., claimed that "a sudden influx into the neighborhood of subsidized families about six years ago turned a borderline neighborhood into a slum."...
[P]ublic controversies over misbehaving Section 8 recipients have exploded.... [C]rime and declining property values caused by Section 8 clients have become a major political issue.... the irresponsibility of a privileged class of renters... Trouble-making public-housing residents will not be transformed into angels simply by moving them into different neighborhoods...
The "Moving to Opportunity" pilot program was never expanded. Let me give the mike to Jon Hilsenrath and Rafael Gerena-Morales:
How Much Does A Neighborhood Affect the Poor?: JON E. HILSENRATH and RAFAEL GERENA-MORALES: December 28, 2006: The Moving to Opportunity program, started in 1994, was a mix of liberal and conservative policy: hatched by Republican Jack Kemp and implemented by the Clinton administration. But later that year, in Baltimore -- one of the five cities participating -- suburbanites rebelled against the idea that poor families from troubled environments would be flocking to their neighborhoods. Plans to move additional families were canceled...
And the results from follow-ups are that the effects of "Moving to Opportunity" were mixed--good for girls, bad for boys:
How Much Does A Neighborhood Affect the Poor?: JON E. HILSENRATH and RAFAEL GERENA-MORALES: December 28, 2006: Can a family escape poverty by getting out of the neighborhood where it takes root?... About two million families currently use "Section 8" vouchers that allow them to move with subsidized rent.... Beginning in 1994, the federal government offered a lottery for housing vouchers to families in five major cities. Families were randomly assigned to different groups. One group received vouchers to be used specifically to subsidize rents in neighborhoods where poverty was low. About 860 families eventually moved. Another group, of 1,440 families, wasn't offered vouchers and, initially at least, stayed in high-poverty neighborhoods. Researchers have since tracked and compared the fortunes of the two groups.
The program, called Moving to Opportunity, was administered by HUD.... Earnings of families who relocated to low-poverty areas averaged just $9,376 in 2001, a half-decade after they moved. That's just 3% higher than the $9,108 earned by those in the control group, a statistically insignificant difference.... In a 2002 survey of 3,521 adults in the program -- most of them women -- 18.5% of people who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods suffered bouts of major depression, significantly lower than the 26.3% who felt depressed in the control group....
Among nearly 800 teenage girls, 83% of those who relocated to low-poverty neighborhoods had either graduated from high school or were still in school five years after the move, compared with 71% in the control group. Alcohol use was lower. Arrest rates were lower. And mental-health measures improved. Away from the violence of the ghetto, girls seemed to flourish.
Teenage boys didn't. School participation deteriorated and property-crime rates, mental distress, and smoking all increased among those who moved with the vouchers, compared with teenage boys in families who didn't move. For property crime, there were 58 arrests for every 100 boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods, compared with 22 arrests for every 100 boys in the control group.... [R]esearchers expected they would respond well to safer, more-affluent environments. Instead, many seemed to feel isolated in the new places, or harassed by police, and they acted out. "It seems like the boys were less able to make social connections to their new areas," says Jeffrey Kling, a Brookings Institution economist who designed many of the Moving to Opportunity studies and interviewed participants...
