Program Profile: Moving to Opportunity Demonstration Program

This is a housing mobility demonstration program intended to help move families from high-poverty public housing to low-poverty private housing to improve their lives. This program is rated No Effects. The program was shown to have no statistically significant long-term effects on violent, property, drug, or general crime arrests.

A No Effects rating implies that implementing the program is unlikely to result in the intended outcome(s) and may result in a negative outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial.

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).

Study 1

Sanbonmatsu and colleagues (2011) conducted a randomized-control trial of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Demonstration Program and its long-term effects on criminal behavior of youths and grown children.

The evaluation included 4,604 low-income families from Baltimore, Md.; Boston, Mass.; Chicago, Ill.; Los Angeles, Calif.; and New York, N.Y.; who were eligible if they had children under 18 and were living in public or government-subsidized housing in high-poverty areas. Enrollment took place between 1994 and 1998. Most of the sample consisted of female-headed households (97.8 percent), had approximately 3.7 family members in the household, were African American (61.4 percent) or Hispanic (31.0 percent), and were on welfare (75.1 percent). Few had a high school diploma (37.5 percent) or GED (17.6 percent).

Once enrolled, families were randomized to one of three groups: MTO treatment, Section 8 treatment, or a control group. The MTO treatment group (n=1,819 families) received Section 8 services with the MTO voucher. The Section 8 treatment group (n=1,346 families) received traditional Section 8 services only. The control group (n=1,439 families) received no MTO or Section 8 vouchers, only social services and public assistance. Since not all families enrolled in the MTO group actually used the vouchers, researchers used an intent-to-treat model to calculate differences among groups.

To examine the impact on youths’ risky and criminal behavior, subsets of the 4,604 households were examined. The subsets included 4,646 grown children who were 20–30 years old on Dec. 31, 2007, and 6,308 youths who were ages 10–20 as of Dec. 31, 2007. Criminal outcomes were reported for youths and grown children in the households 10–15 years after enrollment. Data was collected using survey self-reports and official arrest information. Adult and juvenile arrest histories were retrieved from state criminal justice agencies and in some cases county or city juvenile justice agencies.

Study 2

Sciandra and colleagues (2013) examined the long-term effects of the MTO Demonstration Program on criminal behavior of youth using the same sample as Sanbonmatsu and colleagues (2011). This evaluation examines data on youth 10 years after random assignment (ages 15–25 at the end of 2001 and ages 17–28 at the end of the follow-up period for this study).

Criminal behavior data was collected with administrative arrest records and used to measure the number of times youths were arrested between the MTO random assignment and the end of

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: