Moving to Opportunity: An Experiment in Social and Geographic MobilityAbstractMoving to Opportunity (MTO) is a demonstration designed to ensure a rigorous evaluation of the impacts of helping very low-income families with children to move from public and assisted housing in high-poverty inner-city neighborhoods to middle-class neighborhoods throughout a metropolitan area.Poverty in the United States has become increasingly concentrated in high-poverty areas. These concentrated high-poverty, usually urban, and frequently segregated neighborhoods are widely thought to deny their residents opportunities by denying them access to good schools, safe streets, successful role models, and good places to work. Three possible solutions to the problem of concentration are:
HUD is pursuing research and policy initiatives on all three of these approaches; MTO is designed to measure the value of the first one. We do not know the extent to which moving the poor out of concentrated poverty neighborhoods, in fact, increases their life chances. Poor people who live in concentrated poverty may differ from other poor people both in ways that can be observed, like race or age, and in ways that may not be observed, like aspiration or persistence. Any differences in people 's outcomes that seem to be associated with the neighborhoods in which they reside might be caused by those neighborhoods–or might be caused by unobserved factors that also affect the sorting of people into different neighborhoods. Only an experiment in which neighborhoods are allocated randomly can answer this question. Moving to Opportunity: An Experiment in Social and Geographic Mobility (*.pdf)
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