Government programs that move low-income families to different housing can greatly improve their education and employment — but only if the moves are to neighborhoods with significant advantages and the families have support services. That's one conclusion of a new study by SESP professor James Rosenbaum and Stefanie DeLuca (PhD03) of Johns Hopkins University, comparing key housing mobility programs over the past 30 years. With the court-mandated Gautreaux relocation program that started in 1976, Rosenbaum found striking effects for families who moved from high-poverty housing projects to more advantaged, mainly white suburbs. Rosenbaum's groundbreaking book Crossing the Class and Color Lines details these large advances in mothers' employment and children's education for families who moved to neighborhoods with better labor markets and higher-quality schools, compared with families who stayed in the city. With housing vouchers and support services, half the 7,100 low-income African American families moved into 115 suburbs of Chicago while half stayed in the city.
Compared with the city movers, the suburban movers had much higher employment, and the children were more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, get a job and get a well-paying job. The differences were unusually large, according to Rosenbaum.
Recent studies of Gautreaux have followed up on the earlier work by tracking what happened to mothers and children. They confirm that Gautreaux was successful in helping public-housing families remain in low-poverty, integrated communities. The women who moved to mostly white neighborhoods had higher employment rates and earned more than women placed in lower-income areas.
In contrast to the Gautreaux findings, a scientific study of a 1990s multi-city federal housing program, Moving to Opportunity, found more mixed results. That's because of the way the moves were made and the families' new settings, according to Rosenbaum and DeLuca. "Although MTO tried to replicate Gautreaux, it made some small modifications which led to very different placements than Gautreaux. While MTO is a much stronger research design than Gautreaux, it created a much weaker program. … The lesson is that details are important in replicating a program," says Rosenbaum.
Unlike Gautreaux, MTO was designed as an experiment, with low-income families randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups — an experimental group who moved to low-poverty areas, an open-choice housing voucher group and a non-moving control group. MTO studies showed no gains in academic achievement or school engagement for children from the experimental group.
One key weakness of the MTO program is the low quality of the schools where the children enrolled, Rosenbaum says. For example, 88 percent of suburban children in the Gautreaux program attended schools with above-average achievement, in contrast with only 10 percent of children in the MTO program's experimental group. MTO children attended schools averaging only the 21st percentile of achievement.
In other ways too, significant departures from the Gautreaux program muted MTO's effects, even though MTO featured a more rigorous research design and more data, Rosenbaum explains. One striking drawback of MTO is that families often did not move far from their original neighborhoods and circumstances. While the Gautreaux program moved nearly all families at least 10 miles away from their original neighborhood, only 10 percent of MTO's treatment group moved that far. While Gautreaux discouraged low-income enclaves within tracts, MTO did not. While nearly 100 percent of the suburban movers in the Gautreaux program attended different school districts, only 20 percent of the MTO experimental group did.
Both Gautreaux and MTO found similarly large gains in mothers' employment. However, the MTO impacts may have been due to a strong labor market in the late 1990s, Rosenbaum and DeLuca say. Even the control group that did not move in the MTO study experienced a 100 percent employment gain.
One significant plus for both housing mobility programs was subjective. "Both Gautreaux and MTO vastly increased mothers' and children's feelings of safety," Rosenbaum and DeLuca report. In addition, follow-up interviews with Gautreaux mothers found that they describe a new sense of self-worth and more confidence in their abilities to cope.
As researchers continue to study how neighborhoods can be a policy lever for education and employment, a new program in Baltimore provides a strong model, the authors note. DeLuca is studying families who are moving under a court-ordered desegregation plan in the Thompson case. This program includes a strong counseling component.
Studies in the 1970s showed that when poor people are given vouchers, they tend to choose familiar areas and therefore are less likely to improve their opportunities. Counseling services, as the Gautreaux program provided to advise families about the advantages of suburban neighborhoods, were "crucial components of the program that cannot be overlooked," say the authors.
Rosenbaum and DeLuca's analysis is presented as a working paper through the Institute for Policy Research as "Does Changing Neighborhoods Change Lives? The Chicago Gautreaux Housing Program and Recent Mobility Programs."
Caption:
Children play at a mixed-income housing site for a federal relocation program.
Last Modified: 11/19/09