Neighborhood effects on low-income families.Long-term results from the Moving to Opportunity randomized mobility experiment.

This study estimates the long-term effects of randomized variation in neighborhood conditions on the outcomes of low-income adults and children using data from a 10-15 year follow-up survey of participants in a large social experiment called Moving to Opportunity (MTO). Since 1994 MTO has enrolled a sample of 4,604 families living in distressed public housing communities in five U.S. cities (Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City). Using a random lottery, MTO offered some families but not others the chance to use a housing voucher rent-subsidy to move to a lower-poverty neighborhood. We find evidence of large beneficial impacts of MTO moves on a number of important physical and mental health outcomes, concentrated mostly among adults, and find few statistically significant impacts on either labor market outcomes or children’s schooling outcomes. This mixed pattern of impacts raises questions about the value of policy efforts to reduce concentrations of low-income families in poor neighborhoods. We show that MTO moves from a high-poverty to low-poverty neighborhood also increase measures of self-reported subjective well-being (SWB) by an amount close in size to the overall gap in SWB between U.S. blacks and whites, or between families with annual incomes that differ by around $20,000 per year - a large amount given the average annual income for MTO controls is about $20,000. Our findings also suggest that MTO’s impacts on SWB are driven more by declines in housing and neighborhood distress or neighborhood crime than by declines in neighborhood racial segregation.

Discutant : Laurent Gobillon (INED)