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The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration provided an opportunity for low-income renters to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Many of these renters, however, did not move with their vouchers, and many of those who moved did not stay in low-poverty neighborhoods. In this article, we explore the mechanisms behind these residential outcomes and what they mean for housing policy. First, we review evidence suggesting that MTO families wanted to live in low-poverty \"opportunity areas.\" We then describe how some aspects of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the structural features of the housing market, and the beliefs and coping mechanisms of low-income renters — shaped by years of living in extreme poverty — prevented these families from achieving their goals of residential mobility. Finally, we consider the negative consequences on the life chances of the poor if housing policy does not address constraints to mobility and identify potential policy solutions that might lead to opportunities for low-income renters to live in low-poverty neighborhoods.

Adults living in high-poverty neighborhoods often fare worse than adults in more advantaged neighborhoods on their physical health, mental health, and economic well-being. Although social scientists have observed this association for hundreds of years, they have found it difficult to determine the extent to which the neighborhoods themselves affect well-being versus the extent to which people at greater nskfor adverse outcomes live in impovenshed neighborhoods. In this article, we examine neighborhood effects using data from the 10-to 15-year evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration, which offered randomly selected families a housing voucher. The experimenta design ofMTO allows us to isolate the effects of neighborhoods from selection bias. We find that, 10 to 15 years after enrolling participants, the program had very few detectable effects on economic well-being but had some substantial effects on the physical and mental health of adults. For adults whose families received the offer of a housing voucher that could be used to move only to a low-poverty neighborhood, we find health benefits in terms of lower prevalence of diabetes, extreme obesity, physical limitations, and psychological distress. For adults offered a Section 8 voucher, we find benefits in terms of less extreme obesity and lower prevalence of lifetime depression.

Evidence about the effects of neighborhood environments on children and youth is central to the design of a wide range of public policies. Armed with long-term survey data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration final impacts evaluation (Sanbonmatsu et al, 2011), we have the opportunity to understand whether neighborhood poverty and related charactenstics exert an independent causal effect on the life chances of young people. Findings from analyses of youth in the long-term survey for the final impacts evaluation show that MTO had few detectable effects on a range of schooling outcomes, even for those children who were of preschool age at study entry. MTO also had few detectable effects on physical health outcomes. In other youth outcome domains, patterns of effects on youth were similar to, but more muted than, those in the interim impacts evaluation (On et al, 2003), with favorable patterns among female youth — particularly on mental health outcomes — and less favorable patterns among male youth.

We discuss the policy background for the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration experiment, the innovations in its design and implementation, and a few of the implications for future policy. We explain why a full-blown randomized experiment was necessary, in what ways MTO was unique, and whether the issues posed by concentrated poverty are the same today as when Congress first authonzed the experiment.

At its core, Moving to Opportunity (MTO) was a housing intervention offering public housing families tenant-based vouchers to move to the private market. Giving families vouchers resulted in better quality housing for them 10 to 15 years later, potentially contributing to the physical and mental health improvements of those who participated in MTO. Using a tnangulated, multisource strategy, we find that two-thirds of all MTO households still receive housing assistance. The Section 8 group experienced higher rates of doubling up, although the MTO intervention had no effect on housing cost burdens. The experimental group experienced materia hardship, making tradeoffs between paying their rent on time and paying utilities.

This article examines the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration and concludes that it has limited relevance for understanding the effects of the federal Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8 Program) for four reasons. First, MTO focused on a group of people who lived in public housing at the outset of the study, and this subpopulation represents a small fraction of the recipients of the Section 8 Program. Second, MTO improves neighborhood quality more, on average, than the Section 8 Program does. Third, MTO fails to activate a mechanism that often improves health and is central to the Section 8 Program. Fourth, the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development could probably not bung MTO's major treatment condition to scale because of the relative shortage of affordable rental units in affluent neighborhoods. Because MTO had its clearest effects in the health domain, this article briefly outlines a study of the health effects of the Section 8 Program.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration provided a definitive opportunity to consider the often-wondered question of what would result from helping relocate low-income families away from some of the worst living conditions in the US. The MTO experiment, however, appears to have had no effect, or possibly negative effects, on children's educational outcomes. This article focuses on these provoking results. It turns out, however, that MTO led to neighborhood change, but it did not lead to much school-quality change. Thus, rather than expend resources moving children away from high-poverty areas, facilitating greater access to better schools, preferably through public-school reform so that all children can take advantage of these potential gains, may be a more effective approach to improving long-term gains. Applying an evidence-based policy approach to improve schools also has the advantage of potentially benefiting all children.

The Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan successfully led an intensive, long-term, in-person survey for the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) for Fair Housing demonstration final impacts evaluation (Sanbonmatsu et al, 2011), achieving final effective response rates (ERRs) of 89.6 percent among MTO adults and 88.7 percent among youth, well above what response rates of surveys with comparable low-income populations have accomplished. A variety of survey field strategies ISR employed—careful staff selection, strategic use of financial incentives, and close collaboration between ISR and the National Bureau of Economic Research—all contributed to these high ERRs. The high costs associated with achieving high ERRs for in-person surveys like that employed in MTO raises questions about added value. Costs per survey interview nearly quadrupled during the last 4 fielding months. This extra investment increased the MTO adult survey ERR by only about 3.2 percentage points. A reanalysis of intention-to-treat estimates on selected outcomes suggests the merits of such an investment. If survey fielding had stopped at an 81-percent ERR for adults, we would have falsely concluded that MTO had no effect on two of four key health outcomes, that MTO had no effect on female youth mental health, and that MTO increased female youth idleness.

Moving to Opportunity (MTO) succeeded in ways no one anticipated when it was launched, generating valuable lessons and raising new questions about the effects of neighborhood distress and the potential role of assisted housing mobility. Findings to date have spurred successive rounds of policy innovation and research that test new hypotheses about how, where, and for whom neighborhoods matter and how both housing mobility and neighborhood revitalization can improve outcomes for families and kids. The significance of health outcomes in MTO research has already influenced policy and practice. This research has heightened awareness among housing policymakers and practitioners about health risks facing the families they serve. MTO's findings strongly establish the importance and benefit to families of escaping from severely distressed and dangerous neighborhoods. Moving forward, policymakers can draw on MTO findings to develop place-conscious strategies that both improve the neighborhoods in which poor people currently live and simultaneously open up wider opportunities for them to move to neighborhoods offering greater opportunities.