Moving to Opportunity
Finally, Rosin dismisses a small-scale but important federal demonstration program — Moving to Opportunity (MTO) — that did not operate in Memphis, seemingly to question the wisdom of the poverty deconcentration “theory” itself.
The MTO concept was hatched during the George H. W. Bush administration and implemented by the Clinton administration. The goal was to test whether the then two-decade old Section 8 voucher program could be made more effective in deconcentrating the poverty in public housing. Starting in 1994, HUD launched this voluntary program in five big cities — Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York — to help about 4,600 families who were living in dangerous, distressed public housing relocate to low-poverty neighborhoods. Out of more than 1 million families living in public housing, fewer than 1,900 families were assigned, via MTO, to make the “experimental” moves to low-poverty neighborhoods (for purposes of comparison, the other 2,700 were randomly assigned to receive a different program “treatment”).
The purpose of this demonstration was to learn if these families could find apartments in low poverty neighborhoods (areas less than 10 percent poor as of the 1990 census), if they could then manage to stay living in them, and if they would benefit in a variety of ways from these new neighborhoods. The hope was that greater safety, better schools, and other advantages would help the poor improve their lives. MTO was modeled, as Rosin notes in her article, after the Gautreaux mobility program, a court-ordered and long-researched desegregation effort in greater Chicago. Gautreaux pointed to major benefits, especially for low-income black children who relocated to middle-class suburbs with strong schools, but the early evidence was largely suggestive.
The most important reason why MTO participants volunteered for the program was straightforward: They were afraid for their children and themselves because of the high crime in the inner-city projects. So far, research has found that the MTO families who escaped high-poverty ghettos were thrilled at the safety and security they found, in new neighborhoods, for themselves and their kids. They also experienced major reductions in stress and anxiety; their mental health improved, as did their physical health.
Not every family managed, however to stay in a low-poverty area. Rents went up, landlords sold their buildings, some neighbors harassed the newcomers, or they missed their families. Most, however, did not miss their former neighbors. They feared and avoided their former public housing developments, because those areas remained so threatening.
Most families, then, got out of the program what they hoped and asked for — safety. None of the employment and educational effects found in the Gautreaux program occurred in MTO, at least not yet — as research continues.
Why didn’t MTO lead to the greater economic opportunities that its planners hoped it would provide? One important reason is that the metro areas where MTO was tried simply became too expensive. For the most part, the MTO renters with vouchers were priced out of the suburban middle-class neighborhoods with the excellent schools and greater job opportunities. Also, MTO was not designed to address the fact that about one-quarter of the families were headed by an adult unable to work because of disabling, chronic illness, while many more needed childcare and transportation that, likewise, were not in the package. Similar families appear in Rosin’s article, and she is right: they need intensive services, not just a new address, both for their own sakes and for the sake of their neighbors.
Even so, the research about MTO families reveals that it contributed to a significant decline in depression and distress for women, as well as major declines in risky behavior for girls. These mental-health improvements are on a scale comparable to the effects of the most successful therapies offered. Surprise: Helping people move away from the constant threat of gun violence, and other “weathering” effects of life in stressful ghettos, can dramatically enhance their outlook and ability to cope with other challenges.
Meanwhile, boys who relocated do show modestly higher rates of involvement in property crime, on average, but there is some evidence that this reflects trips back to the old neighborhood — or other high-poverty areas where relatives and peers get the movers into trouble.
MTO is teaching government officials and researchers a great deal more about the need for a much bigger supply of rental housing that stays affordable, as well as how to develop better housing mobility counseling programs to guide families in choosing better communities for themselves, including better school districts. MTO did its main job — it has taught us how to design and implement such efforts more wisely, and beyond that, it has shown major benefits for families. Not the ones predicted but still very important ones, prized by the families themselves.
MTO was not intended to be a cure-all for poverty, but it illustrates what a modest relocation effort can accomplish when families receive counseling, search assistance and other supports to find a better neighborhood to live in. It can improve the quality of life of the poor significantly, even if it’s not enough to help them escape poverty. What’s more, with added supports and better targeting, MTO-type efforts could have broader benefits for thousands of additional low-income families.
How Not to Learn from Mistakes
Academics and policymakers have learned a great deal from both the mistakes and the successes of anti-poverty programs, including those focused on ghetto neighborhoods, since the 1960s.
We know, for example, that the best anti-poverty program is a good job. Full employment at living wages is the best solution to America’s poverty quagmire. We also need to invest in education and job training, to raise the minimum wage at least to the poverty level, to expand the EITC so it reaches more families, and to provide low-income parents with the support they need to enter the job market, such as child care and health insurance. Redoubled efforts to fight crime in the most violent neighborhoods, and to protect those places, which tend to be poor racial ghettos, from an utterly disproportionate share of our society’s environmental hazards, are vital too.
Back to escaping poverty: Those adults who have not been able to maintain regular employment, including some extremely disadvantaged families who found a foothold in public housing, need additional supports. Chronic mental and physical ailments keep them from functioning in the private housing market, let alone the job market.
Housing policy is a vital piece of the agenda for both groups, but now more than ever, we understand why it can’t lift people out of poverty on its own. Section 8 vouchers, especially when tied to counseling for tenants and recruitment of landlords, can be an important tool to help families choose where they want to live and pay the rent, so long as there’s an adequate supply of rental housing and so long as the relocation programs are run carefully alongside efforts to strengthen vulnerable or declining neighborhoods.
Where there is not adequate supply, public policy should promote the construction of mixed-income housing in both central cities and suburbs. We no longer build traditional public housing projects. If one excludes special units restricted to the elderly, we haven’t done so in more than 30 years. Instead, we have a sophisticated industry of both private and nonprofit developers who have experience building well-designed, well-managed mixed-income housing, and there too, careful studies of HOPE VI and other programs point the way to stronger, more equitable efforts in the years to come.
Rosin heard these ideas when she interviewed a number of the nation’s top housing researchers, but she chose to misconstrue what they said in order to produce the dramatic, but misleading, conclusion that low-income housing programs had the unintended consequence of driving up crime, including murder — all the way out in the once-healthy Memphis suburbs and city neighborhoods too. We have not claimed that this effect is impossible, only that she never presents adequate evidence for it.
The questions that Rosin fails to ask her in her article are the most fundamental ones. Why does the U.S. have the highest poverty rate among the world’s affluent nations, and why is it far more segregated by race and income?
Despite America’s vast wealth, no other major industrial nation has allowed the level of sheer destitution that exists in the U.S. Americans accept as “normal” levels of poverty and inequality — as well as homelessness, hunger, malnutrition and diseases, and geographic concentrations of same — that would cause national alarm in Canada, Western Europe, or other wealthy regions.
Recently, the Center for American Progress, along with a number of community groups and former Senator John Edwards, announced an ambitious plan, “Half in Ten,” to cut the nation’s poverty rate in half in the next 10 years. If we are to launch such an effort, and do it smart, we need journalists to help explain what policies do and don’t work and what it would really take to build public support. But by casting such a circumstantial case, Rosin’s Atlantic article confuses more than it clarifies.
We’ve learned a great deal, over the past decade, about the role that low-income housing policy — the successes and failures alike — can play. It’s a shame the sensationalized “murder mystery” didn’t find a story there.
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HI MY NAME IS JACQUELIN SHERRELL AND I WOUJLD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR NEW ORLEANS LA THE KATRINA VICTIMS AND THERE DISPOSITION WITH THEIR HOUSING WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE UNDER THE BRIDGES AND THE LIMIT SHELTER SPACES THOSE PEOPLE SUFFER AS WELL I THINK YOU SHOULD DO AN ARTICLE ON NEWORLEANS AND PLEASE RESPOND TO MY COMMENT
THANK YOU JACQUELIN SHERRELL
On page 4 of 5 the following excerpt appeared:
In 1990, Memphis was a city of 618,652. The city’s poverty rate was 22.9 percent—139,767 people lived below poverty. By 2000, Memphis had grown to 650,100. Along with the rest of the nation, its poverty rate had declined—to 20.6 percent—or 133,920 people. By 2005, however, while the city’s population fell to 642,251, its poverty rate spiked to 23.6 percent—or 151,571 people. While the overall number of poor people increased by about 12 percent, the number of poor adolescents (12-17) increased by about 45 percent.
How many individuals does that 45% represent? And where can I find the statistics that are being used for the numbers shown above? Thanks Carl Awsumb