Moving to Opportunity: The Demonstration's Design and its Effects on Mobility

Abstract

Poverty concentration in urban neighbourhoods may have detrimental long-term effects on residents. The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment in the US randomly assigned high-poverty public housing residents to a programme that subsidised occupancy in non-poor areas, permitting controlled analysis of neighbourhood impacts. In this paper, MTO data are used to answer the following questions. How much impact can a one-time intervention have on the subsequent residential experience of poor families from high-poverty neighbourhoods? It is found that the impacts on subsequent residential experience are statistically and practically significant. Are poor families who move to non-poor neighbourhoods significantly different from poor families who do not, in (usually) unmeasured characteristics? It is found that yes, they are. What difference does moving to a better neighbourhood make? There are large gains in safety, other improvements in neighbourhood quality and no loss in social ties.