Program Goals
During the early 1990s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development developed the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing mobility experiment. The goal was to help families living in high-poverty areas move into less-economically deprived neighborhoods to improve their lives and their children’s lives. Families were recruited between 1994 and 1998 from high-poverty public housing sites in five cities: Baltimore, Md.; Boston, Mass.; Chicago, Ill.; Los Angeles, Calif.; and New York, N.Y.
The program was implemented as a randomized-control trial to determine whether moving to a neighborhood with less poverty, rather than some other measure, would directly improve outcomes related to health, mental health, economic self-sufficiency, education, and risky and criminal behavior.
Program Components
Families with children under 18 were recruited through fliers, tenant associations, and other means. Interested families were added to waiting lists of the local public housing authorities and attended group orientations sessions to learn about the demonstration program.
The MTO program used a lottery system to provide randomly selected families in public housing the opportunity to relocate to housing in less-economically deprived areas (areas where the poverty rate was 10 percent or lower according to the 1990 census) using a housing voucher system. One group of families were given Section 8 housing vouchers, which provided rent subsidies for private housing in similar high-poverty neighborhoods, and MTO vouchers, which provided special assistance to move to private housing in low-poverty neighborhoods. Mobility counseling was provided to help families relocate to an appropriate neighborhood and also help them with leasing a unit. Families could relocate after 1 year without any special constraints on location. The other groups received either traditional Section 8 services or other social services and public assistance.
Program Theory
The MTO Demonstration Program is informed by numerous theoretical approaches, all of which fall within the context of Shaw and McKay’s (1969) social disorganization theory. Social disorganization theory hypothesizes that neighborhoods have both formal and informal controls that monitor each other’s behaviors and other threats (Leventhal and Brooks–Gunn 2002). Socially disorganized neighborhoods (i.e., industrialized, urban, transient population) have poor formal and informal controls leading to criminal and delinquent behavior. In terms of the MTO program, moving residents to a less economically deprived area, and a more socially organized neighborhood, should reduce their chances of becoming involved in criminal and delinquent activities.
Other theories that inform MTO include the developmental neighborhood-effects hypotheses that suggest that younger children could be more deeply affected than older children by a move to a middle-class neighborhood; a situational neighborhood-effects model that suggests even a modest change to the decision-making environment can affect criminal behavior; and a typology by Jencks and Mayer (1990) that defines four different types of models about why neighborhood environments might affect people’s behavior and well-being. Overall, the theories hypothesize different ways in which neighborhood environments affect individual behavior, including criminal behavior (Sciandra et al. 2013).
